Zooming Mandelbrot Set Screen Saver

I’ve just added a new download. It’s a screensaver, which displays an image of the Mandelbrot Set, before slowly zooming in on whatever part of the fractal it thinks is probably interesting.

• Code Factory Entry Here
• Direct Download Link Here (7.1kB, requires .NET Framework, which you may already have)

Technical notes:

• The settings screen assumes you understand what the Mandelbrot Set is. If you don't, the point is that for each point on the screen, the colour represents the number of iterations required before the value exceeds a certain cutoff. You don't need to know what that means, but the cutoff is one of the options. Since some points (those within the Mandelbrot Set) will never get there, so the maximum number of iterations option lets you choose when it should give up. A higher cutoff will produce smoother colours but take longer to process. A higher number of iterations will produce more detail but again take longer to process.
• The colour step controls how fast the colour changes. A low number will give less contrast but a less psychedelic image.
• The minimum spread to zoom, which must be between 0 and 1, controls how interesting something has to be before it will be zoomed in on. Some parts of the image take longer to process than others, so the maximum difficulty to zoom, which again must be between 0 and 1, controls how long a part of the image could take before it will be ignored. If no area of the screen matching these rules can be found, then it will revert to the entire Mandelbrot Set image and start zooming again.
• After a great many zooms, you start to hit the limits of double-precision floating point numbers, so changing the maximum zooms option puts a hard limit on how many times it zooms before going back to the start. I find the 40th zoom is where it starts going wrong, though to be fair by that point you're looking at an area that would have been 1% the size of a hydrogen atom at the original zoom level.
• There's no frame rate limiter in this. If you have a ludicrously fast PC at low resolution, it may run too fast. You could try increasing the first two numbers to silly levels. That ought to slow it right down.
• I have no idea what happens to this screensaver on multiple monitors.