Muryan

As it happens I’ve had a lot of spare time recently with COVID lockdowns keeping me stuck at home… In the spirit of making positive use of my time I’ve given Ephemeral a major rewrite, and it now uses the same screen saver engine as Fronds.

I’ve also made a number of enhancements that have resulted in better graphics and faster animation:

• When different parts of a fractal overlap each other they blend together, giving a translucent appearance. In previous versions the fractal would overwrite itself with a speckled look.
• Animation speed has been increased from 30 FPS to the native rate of the screen (usually 60 FPS for a laptop screen, for example).
• Drawing efficiency has been greatly improved. This has allowed the increase in animation speed and the blended drawing.

Ephemeral now requires Metal (I’ve dropped support for OpenGL), and as a result the minimum required version of macOS has increased to 10·13. However, I still have a couple of legacy versions available to download for systems predating 10·13.

I’m really happy with this release of Ephemeral. I’ve been running it for a while now and it looks great. I hope you like it too!

You can download Ephemeral here.

Bonus news: I’ve got another screen saver on the way! It’s much easier to bring my ideas to life now that I can use my screen saver engine to handle the boring aspects of screen saver construction. This one will also use fractals, but in a very different way. Stay tuned for more news in the near future.