Fred's Fractal Viewer doesn't try to be the best fractal generation program around. There are lots of other programs around that do that better. See Fractint. Fred tries to do three things well:
1) Allow the user to rapidly pan and zoom through extremely large(> 1 billion pixel) pre-calculated fractal images.
2) Provide tools for interactively creating palettes and experimenting with color.
3) Allow the user to easily create very large prints, eg. 10 feet square.
Currently, Fred is in beta test. It is able to quickly display billion pixel fractals. You can create bookmarks to favorite locations in the fractal. The zoom logic is discrete now, you can zoom in and out by factors of two - I need to modify this so that you can zoom in and out continuously. Color palette support is pretty good - this includes palette animation and a powerful tool for interactively creating color washes.
My biggest problem with releasing Fred is the fact that I cannot easily provide the full product for download over the Internet because the images are so large. I could release a compact version that lets the user build the fractal images on their machine, but the images can easily take 24 hours to build, and exceed a gigabyte in size!
If you are interested in getting a test version of Fred's Fractal Viewer and a large fractal image on a CD, send e-mail to elliotl@torpor.com. Test versions are free, but they may have some rough edges.
Here is a gallery of sample images created with Fred. Click on an image to view the full size version. Full size versions are fairly large, eg. 1200 pixels wide and 900 pixels high.
This is the Spectrum Gradient application that is bundled
with Fred. It allows you to interactively create interesting palettes.
The following three images are all identical except that their palettes are 'shifted':
