I've had tons of fun with it. You can enter your own formulas as well as change coloring, do automatic rotation/color cycling for a trippy effect, and a ton more of exploration. Explore all the fractals! :-)
Strangely enough, I feel like this would be more impressive if it rendered more slowly. Does anybody else remember waiting several minutes for a fractal to render? These days, it's so easy to forget how amazing it really is.
Depends on the fractal. I occasionally make HD animations (using Ultra Fractal), and those run about 1 hour PER FRAME. A short clip takes several months, just to render. (search for jockc on youtube if interested)
You might enjoy this JavaScript turtle graphics renderer I built. It has a few sample fractals and everything renders incrementally. http://obadger.com/turtle/
I have also made[1] a similar thing which allows you to select colouring and enter the seeds manually, and then export the resulting picture in the resolution you want.
Nice graphics, but this creates some problems with the back button. In IE10 the back history is transformed into an infinite list of "Fractal Machine" links (specially using animate). In Chrome pressing the back button does nothing (the icon spins, but the page never changes.)
Somehow, as soon as graphics are involved, things that are essentially "hello, world!" kinds of projects routinely make it to the front page of HN. This is neat, specially for someone's 2nd programming project, but is it HN material? I think not.
A webGL version - even using JS to make lines, and just using gl.LINES for the plotting - would be much more responsive. For extra points though, put the rendering inside a GLSL fragment shader!
Recently it was ported to iOS which is pretty cool..so it really runs on about anything: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xaos/id576120234?mt=8
I've had tons of fun with it. You can enter your own formulas as well as change coloring, do automatic rotation/color cycling for a trippy effect, and a ton more of exploration. Explore all the fractals! :-)