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Notes:

Release Name: fractals-1.2.0

Notes:
Fractals is a library for creating fractal images in your Ruby programs. It
currently renders the Burning Ship, Julia Set, Mandelbrot, and Newton fractals
using the Escape Time or Normalized Iteration Count algorithm. The Themes
module contains a few predefined coloring palettes, but the Fractal type will
also accept any user-defined algorithm or theme.

Installation:
  sudo gem install fractals-1.2.0.gem

Installing from source:
  svn checkout http://svn.ryanbaxter.net/fractals/tags/1.2.0 fractals-1.2.0
  cd fractals-1.2.0
  rake install

Using Fractals:
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'fractals'

  mandelbrot = Fractals::Mandelbrot.new
  mandelbrot.write

Examples can be found in the examples.rb file.

License:
  Copyright (c) 2009  Ryan Baxter

  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
  modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
  as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
  of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
  GNU General Public License for more details.

  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
  Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.



Changes: There have been a few changes since version 1.1.0. I've removed most of the duplicate code, added Procs where appropriate, and made the syntax more consistent. The result is much more readable and should be easier to maintain. 1. The source code has been split into multiple files. One for each module. 2. Each of the fractals has been distilled to a single block passed to the Fractal base class' constructor. This makes it easy to construct new orbits fractals by either inheriting from Fractal or instantiating it directly. 3. Classes have been added for the Burning Ship and Newton fractals. 4. A 'Winter' theme has been added. 5. Users can now choose which dependancy nightmare they'd prefer. PNG, RMagick and JRuby each have their own renderer. PNGRenderer is the default, but is easy to override with the renderer= method. 6. bailout and max_iterations are no longer constructor parameters. This is the biggest breaking change. 7. Unit tests have been added for each fractal. 8. Several rake tasks have been added to make installation and gem creation easier. See the documentation for a complete API reference.