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.