The roads I take...

Finally, there is a website up where I can post the wallpaper (and possibly other) designs I made with SeaMonkey imagery!

You may remember my earlier "Knock, Knock, Alpha." post with the Matrix-inspired wallpapers and the recent Mandelbrot app post with that SeaMonkey logo coming out of the Mandelbrot set. Now you can get all those in full quality, comment on them, vote for them and whatnot.



Where? On MCC - the Mozilla Creative Collective!

Thanks to everyone at Mozilla who made that site possible!

This week, I found some more time to hack around on my fun project to do a Mandelbrot set fractal renderer in XULRunner - some of that fun hackery done on the N810, some on my desktop, finally some on my laptop, and now those sources create a really usable application.
The only thing holding me back from doing a downloadable "(pre)release" package of any kind is that it's still somewhat hard to do that for XUL/JS-only XULRunner apps. I'd need to compile my own XULRunner and package it with that or such to get a usable downloadable thing.



What I added this week to bring it over the top was a zoom function that works by dragging the mouse over any piece of a rendered image and a possibility to bookmark locations and call them up again at a later point. With that, one can easily navigate to different places and get pictures like the one above - my laptop calculated and rendered the original 1280x1024 picture in a matter of seconds, with a 1.9.1 XULRunner from some time this weekend, so the same TraceMonkey present in Firefox 3.5.2 to calculate all those iterations, and I did save the contents of the canvas used to paint it as a PNG with the functionality I have in the application. Any quality degradation comes from scaling and converting to JPEG on my web server.

Oh, and there's one more interesting picture I did get out of this work:


(larger sizes linked, original 1280x1024 desktop-wallpaper-ready version available on personal request)

All the fractal pixels in this image come from TraceMonkey's calculation again, of course, but the GIMP helped slightly to finish off this one.

Wake up, Alpha.

The SeaMonkey has you...

Follow the frozen tree.

Knock, knock, Alpha.



Whoever can read this matrix code should realize by now:
Yes, we're knocking at the door of our first Alpha. It's been dozing along in our repositories long enough - the real story of its life is about to begin. The code is supposed to freeze for SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 1 on Tuesday - after that line we will only accept changes to SeaMonkey code that are either blocking the Alpha (pref panels!) or have explicit approval.

We will release the actual Alpha 1 as soon as all the blockers are fixed and we get a QA run to confirm it's ready for testing by a greater community than nightly testers. It will still be a testing-only preview of what SeaMonkey 2 has to offer, but it will be a very huge step compared to the current stable 1.1.x series.

Additionally, I think we should set up a collection of SeaMonkey-themed desktop wallpapers and SeaMonkey-themed web button images somewhere, I'd need good ideas of where to do that.



For now, I can only provide low-quality images of those two I have designed for my personal fun, but if we have a good place to put up such thing, I have the first one as a 1024x768 PNG, the second one in sizes up to 1600x1200 as PNGs.