It was an email out of the blue, with the subject line “A surprise cold call mail from quite far away”. It ended: “Cheers from the other other side of the globe, spring just looming … Kai.” It turns out the Kai in the email was Kai Krause, a software pioneer well known in the 1990s for products like Kai’s Power Tools, Bryce and Goo. It seems he’s been busy. And he wants New Zealand to be the test market for a new application he’s been working on – Frax – an iPhone/iPad app aimed at visualising the beauty of mathematics in real-time. In his initial email – we’ve exchanged many emails over the past two weeks – Krause told me he had “tried hard to reduce the spotlight that had been on me since the first company in 1982″. “I could not be further away from the concept of ‘retired’, just living my life on a public stage is not really healthy,” he said. Krause built a new team with programmers Ben Weiss and Tom Beddard to design Frax, which in the end took three years. He praised his partners for the work they did. “Ben did the entire really deep math engine and Tom, a world renowned expert on fractals as well, wrote the entire cloud structure, website and such.” So, what was the goal with Frax? “We hoped to create play value without it being a game per se: There is no cranky fowl to shoot at, no high scores… But instead you are exploring a world of sheer endless detail. Making no claim for ‘productivity’ it is meant to feel playful and almost without any ultimate goals you “need to” achieve. “Then again – just as you may think it is merely a graphics toy – you realise that it is much, much deeper than that: You are playing with the mathematical underpinnings of nature – fractals and chaos are an important extension to our understanding of science. “One important aspect is that it should have real depth, like an instrument: The first time you sit down at a piano, anyone can produce a little melody, dancing with one finger on the keys. So there is that immediate sensation of feeling creative but obviously there is so much more to it – after years you are getting better and with more understanding comes truly deeper aesthetic achievement, until a Bach or Chopin, shows the ultimate mastership. iphone 4 china “We were striving for both that immediacy – you can zoom and pan and fling colours and move lights within the first three minutes – and the longevity: There will still be new things to find after weeks and months – and in our case after three years and thousands of files, we ourselves are still getting to entirely perplexing new effects! That kind of longevity is rare in software. We hope people will find it.” Ad Feedback Frax is now live exclusively in the New Zealand App Store, and the basic version, Frax Explore, will cost $1.29 on iPhone and $2.59 on iPad. You can upgrade from inside the app to the Pro version, which provides a whole host of other tools, for $8.29 (iPhone) and $9.99 (iPad). Features in Frax Pro include being able to render scenes “in the cloud” at a resolution of 50 megapixels (over 8000 by 6000).”. But what is Frax like? How did I find it? Fascinating, mesmerising and magical. Even after a week of using it, I feel I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface what Frax’s possibilities are. It’s the sort of app that I came back to several times during the day, as a break to the normal workload, just to see what patterns and patterns I could come up with. Much of Frax’s delight comes from just playing around with it and seeing what you can create. It seems more art program than anything else, with an almost playful and whimsical feel about it as you swipe, pinch and drag a finger across the screen, creating more colourful scenes and more detailed shapes. Doing things like selecting the colour tab then touching the screen and flicking your finger animates the colour you’ve selected, creating a mesmerising display of rotating colour. It’s fascinating and hard to describe what’s actually going on but it will have you playing around for hours. As well as changing colours of each scene you can also change how the light sources fall on it and rotate it, just by spinning the scene with a finger. The Pro version lets you drill down and adjust spectrum, lights and textures – and continue pinching and you realise that the image you’ve been working on is actually embedded in the word “frax”. It’s amazing. The Pro version comes with almost 200 pre-rendered scenes which you can play around with, then save to your device’s picture gallery. You can also render them to the cloud and print them out. Krause told me that there are 400 screens of tips and tricks. Krause says he, Beddard and Weiss wanted to bring the beauty of fractals to the masses. “There have been fractal geeks playing with these things for decades but we wanted to bring it to a much wider audience, to discover what that deep fascination has been all about.” “Endlessness as such is, of course, not that big a deal – any pencil can produce an infinite number of scribblings on a piece of paper, but it would be safe to say that no-one could easily master Frax in a matter of weeks or months. And that in itself is a kind of lesson to learn: a few parameters acting on each other can produce chaotic behaviours, in this case textures in such a huge space of possibilities that it is just about impossible to predict.” His fascination with electron microscopy is clearly evident in Frax. “It actually hits on a similar aesthetic sensibility: the shapes in electron microscopy images are intrinsically black and white (many of them colourised with the tools we built for Photoshop 20 years ago). “There you see nature up close in very small details – and you feel the mystery how it becomes not de-constructed and clear – but on the contrary: the simple house fly is unravelled to be a masterpiece of design and elegance far beyond any human achievements. “That Einsteinian reverence for the mysterious, how nature can produce such beauty is exactly where Frax hits you.” Krause said the biggest challenge in creating Frax was him being in Germany, Ben in Los Angeles and Tom in Scotland. “It is a real tribute to technology and a liberating example that such a thing could happen spread around the globe like that. We literally only met one single time all three, for 48 hours.”
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