Preferences
The
Preferences
panel is used to set rendering quality,
behavior,
sharing and file actions.
Rendering
Quality
Under
Rendering
you can set various settings which control how the on-screen image
appears and behaves. This includes controlling trade-offs
between performance and quality.
While
doing things such as zooming, panning the image, or changing a slider
value, quadrium updates the display at a reduced quality to improve
responsiveness, controlled by the Feedback
Coarseness
menu. On a slower machine such as a G3 laptop, you'll probably want to
set this to Coarse
while on a dual G5 or a MacBookPro you could set this to Fine.
Try the different settings and see which results in the best trade off
between performance and feedback quality.
Default Iteration Limit
provides a default value for iterated nodes (such as escape
fractals). The higher the value, the finer the detail the
node produces, but the slower it becomes. Node iteration values can
be adjusted on a node by node case as well - this just provides default
values.
Enable Vector Processing
allows you take advantage of the full Altivec power of your G4 or G5 (this
option is disabled for G3 based machines). You normally want
it turned on, though it can drain the battery of a laptop
faster.&nsp; For an Intel based machine, this switch is more benchmarking
than any practical purpose.
Antialias
cause the display to be rendered at twice the resolution, and then
smoothed, creating a much better looking display, but this also
requires four times as many calculations, and thus slowing things
down. If you have Altivec enabled on a fast machine this many
not matter much, but on a slow machine, it's probably best to leave
this off.
Sharing
There are two
ways to share your quadrium
creations. One is to share locally, which uses Bonjour to
make your images available to people on the same network as you, while
the other is to use your .Mac account to share globally.
Under Local
Sharing you simply click the
checkbox to enable sharing, and specify the name that you want your
machine to appear as to others, and from that point on, you can share
an image by selecting File:Add To Shared Favorites
and it will be available to others (it will show up in the "Locally
Shared" section of the Starting Points
window). Note that this requires you copy of quadrium to be
running (since it acts as a server), but does make it easy to
brainstorm designs with others in your offices, for example.
Under .Mac
you have the ability to specify what users you want to browse in your Starting Points
window. The account gandreas
is always there, but you can easily add or remove other
users. Note that you do not need to have a .Mac account to
browse the creations of others - only if you want to publish your own
for others to see.
Assuming you do have a .Mac account, you can share your creation using File:Publish on iDisk
to publish your image on your .Mac's iDisk. Note that it
takes very little space to do this - most are under 40K, since it
stores the underlying formula, not the high resolution image.
If you decide later to remove something you aren't happy with, you can
select your own account in the Staring
Points
window, which will display your files. You can then drag them
to the trash and it will automatically remove them from your iDisk.
Behavior
Depending on how
you like to work with
quadrium, there are a couple of options that can be customized to make
things easier.
Automatically
Remove Held Items When Used -
When you select a held item (either regular or temporary) quadrium can
automatically remove it from the list (since the idea was that you were
holding on to it for later, and at this point it is now
"later"). If you'd rather not have this happen, deselect this
checkbox and quadrium will explicitly ask you if you wish to keep or
remove the item.
Default Units - By default, quadrium
will use the system configuration to determine if it should use centimeters or
inches for measurements. You can change this explicitly using this popup menu.
File Actions
When you render an image
to disk, the resulting file can have a number of possible actions performed on
it. These can include openning the file in a graphics program, or feeding it
into an Automator action (for those running 10.4). This panel allows you to
specify what items will appear on the "render to disk" file dialog popup.
Simply click Add or
Delete to add or delete an item
from the list of available actions. You can pick from any application that
supports TIFF files, or Automator actions, so you could, for example, set up
and action to automatically upload your rendered image to your website's gallery.