Roger,
I was wondering what you thought of the idea of using OpenGL for xfractint? It is readily compiled under Cygwin even under Vista 64. Likewise, it is readily compiled under most common Linux distributions.
Yes, it has been given some thought. It is a reasonable idea. I don't know enough of the details to make a decision at this time. If I could figure out how to force a refresh with X11, then color cycling would not be an issue. Open up the palette editor, change the color map, and then close the palette editor. The area under the palette editor will have the new color map displayed. So, it *can* be done in X11.
Quite nicely, there is a solution for palette rotation in OpenGL which works in both environments (I've seen it work).
Of course the building of the traditional menus might be some work if they wanted to be kept. But all keystrokes can be captured and fractint usage would be able to be as it always has been.
One problem is that we need to have a stable interface because I don't want to have to rewrite the code every year or so to keep up with changes to the graphics engine. I ran into this when I was working with the Allegro port of Rich's code. Jonathan