It's been a long time since the last release, but I finally decided to make a new version. The main new feature in this release is the possibility to generate high quality fractal images of arbitrary size (up to 4000 x 4000 pixels) and save them in PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP or PPM format. Also a few minor bugs were fixed. Finally, a new improved installer for Windows was created, allowing to install Fraqtive for current user or all users and using a much smaller, compressed executable file.

This release adds some minor improvements of the user interface. In addition, the Windows Modern Style, which I wrote specially for Fraqtive and WebIssues, was re-licensed to a BSD-style license, allowing it to be reused in both open source and commercial applications. See the Modern Qt style for Windows article for more information.

In this release two animation modes were added: color scrolling and mesh rotation. I also fixed a few small bugs and improved compatibility with the new Qt 4.4. After nearly five years of development it can be considered a stable and feature-rich version. This is also the last release in this stage; in the nearest future I'm not planning to add new features except small improvements and fixes.

This release adds only one, but very interesting feature: rendering the fractal surface as a 3D mesh, using the OpenGL library for hardware-accelerated performance. It's possible to adjust the mesh resolution and various parameters of the view. The rendered image can also be saved or copied to clipboard.

Please test the 3D view and report any problems or suggestions. I will make one or two more releases of Fraqtive to close the first phase of the development roadmap by the end of May.

The second release in the 0.4 series adds some new features to Fraqtive, including: loading and saving bookmarks and color presets (including some predefined presets), working in full screen mode and copying and saving fractal images in various formats.

The crash occurring when quickly zooming in on multi-core processors, reported by a few users, was fixed. Note that there is still some rare problem in that situation (the fractal loses its position), I will try to fix it for the next release.

I also fixed compilation with MinGW and, thanks to the excellent collaboration with Patrick Matthäi, the Debian packager, problems with compilation using gcc 4.3 and building for MIPS and ARM platforms were solved. By the way - I'm looking for packages for other distributions. I'm trying to add what I can find to the downloads page, but it would help me a lot if you send me some links.