Hi, Florian's wish list sounds very appealing, and also fairly familiar - I've seen similar discussions before (eg http://protofractals.sourceforge.net/ has very similar suggestions). Where things become difficult is translating the grand plan into practice both because it's a huge amount of work and because with such a plethora of platforms (Windows, DOS, Linux X11, command-line, Java, Mac...) it becomes hard to serve them all well. It's also hard to get enough developers to agree on a common approach to implement the grand plan - witness just how many small fractal programs are listed on SourceForge. While this discussion on approaches is going on, I thought I'd mention that I'm currently tinkering with my own fractal program (http://gnofract4d.sourceforge.net/). Currently it's limited to Linux and to a small set of built-in fractals, though internally it's divided into a fairly platform-neutral C++ library and a front-end which does the GUI stuff. One interesting quirk which I've found is great for performance (but not so great for portability) is that to draw a fractal it splices together fragments of C++ code at runtime, runs the compiler, and calls the resulting code. This means that everything runs at full speed- the iteration and bailout functions can be inlined completely. My latest scheme is a full-blown compiler for Fractint (and some UltraFractal) formulas, which will compile the formula to C. This way I hope to be able to run user-specified formulas as fast as built-in functions. I have this about half-implemented - the lexer, parser and translation to intermediate code are all working - next I need to sort out the back end. Anyway, it's good to see some ideas being thrown about. I'd be interested in collaborating if anyone has any concrete plans... Regards, -- Edwin