Despite this website’s well-known purpose, none of the apps on this page are intended for artistic creation. Of course, they can produce classic images, though nothing particularly fancy, since their role is primarily didactic. They’re more like exploratory tools for specific ideas, though some complement each other well. They help —a little— with visualizing fractal structures in the Mandelbrot and Julia sets, allowing users to inspect fine details and to test basic ideas along the way.
I have used Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude chatbots, individually or even in combination at different stages of development, to build these apps since I know nothing about coding myself. They run directly in any web browser with JavaScript enabled and require no configuration. I’ve tested them on Windows, Mac, and Android, and they seem to be working fine.
While it’s perfectly fine to use these apps casually, I hope they spark curiosity and encourage further exploration using more specialized fractal programs. Just browse the list of available software in the Fractalware section and download as many as you want; they’re all freeware.
Explorers
HyperMandel – As its name suggests, HyperMandel provides an easy and friendly way to explore the Mandelbrot set interactively. Users can pan around, zoom in and out, and adjust some basic color settings to reveal the intricate patterns that emerge at every turn. The goal is to offer an introduction to fractals and how to create these images. While other applications do this more extensively, this one serves as my learning project and a simple entry point for curious newcomers. I prioritized simplicity in this version, so HyperMandel doesn’t support extreme zoom levels or advanced coloring methods. The UI is available in both English and Spanish.
Mandel Plane – Mandel Plane is the next step after my first effort at building a fractal explorer. This time, I wanted to go deeper into the same set, so this one pushes magnification as far as JavaScript reasonably allows in a browser. The idea is to inspect subtle features that aren’t visible in the previous app, such as fine boundary structure and tiny secondary formations. While the original can make some attempts at being artistic, Mandel Plane leans much more toward exploratory and research-oriented use. As a result, it looks somewhat plain and dull in comparison. Deep zooming requires far more numerical precision and computational power than a browser-based tool can provide, so this app is constrained by performance and floating-point limits. As a trade-off, it can become painfully slow and sluggish at extreme magnifications.
Julia Morph – Of course, the Mandelbrot set wouldn’t be complete without its Julia set counterpart, and that’s the purpose of Julia Morph: to provide an accessible way to explore and understand the relationship between these two fractals. It allows users to analyze how different parameter values selected from the main set affect the resulting Julia image, focusing on developing intuition through direct visual feedback. The app emphasizes clarity over exhaustive controls, making it better suited for learning than for producing artistic renderings (see the picture at the top).
Other tools
Mandelbrot Hyperbolic Period Finder – I’ve always been a big fan of minibrots; they are the common denominator in most of my images. Since I usually wander randomly, hunting for these pearly inhabitants of the Mandelbrot set (and they are everywhere), I’ve always wanted a tool I could use to identify them —maybe even name them— more properly. And this is it: the Mandelbrot Hyperbolic Period Finder. It is a lightweight analysis tool that takes a complex parameter c as input (real and imaginary coordinates inside a minibrot) and then iterates , starting from the critical orbit, to look for an attracting cycle and estimate the corresponding hyperbolic component period, when one exists. Now I can at least say which period a given minibrot belongs to, instead of relying on its appearance alone.
Mandelbrot Period‑Bulb Calculator – The Mandelbrot Period-Bulb Calculator is my attempt to implement what the hyperbolic finder does, but in a graphical way, and then take it a bit further. With the previous app, I could already input the coordinates of a minibrot generated elsewhere and have it calculate the hyperbolic period. Here, I can explore the Mandelbrot set directly and click a button to trigger the same analysis. Despite its graphical nature, its focus is not on visual exploration or artistic rendering, but more on numerical experimentation, helping users probe the structure behind the familiar shapes.
Advanced Mandelbrot Period-Bulb Calculator &
MiniBrot Period & Bulb Explorer – These two are closely related: the latter is basically a reinterpretation of the former. I used Claude to build the Advanced Mandelbrot Period-Bulb Calculator as an attempt to graphically calculate the period of bulbs along the boundary while inspecting the Mandelbrot set. The result was solid from the start: an interactive explorer that lets you click any point and try to identify the period of the surrounding hyperbolic component. When detection succeeds, the tool reports the estimated period and, optionally, an approximate rotation number. Additionally, it can display the corresponding Julia set for each selected point in the main set. The MiniBrot Period & Bulb Explorer, on the other hand, builds on the same core idea but with a narrower lens. Instead of emphasizing general bulb detection anywhere in the set, it reframes the calculator as a tool for inspecting and identifying individual minibrots and their associated bulbs. The underlying mathematics and detection logic remain essentially the same, but the presentation shifts toward exploration and classification through comparison and analysis of specific structures rather than general-purpose probing.
Other app UIs
