FractalNet
Home Software Music Other
Overview   Overview
Guitar Chord Explorer   GCE
Marble Challenge   Marble Challenge
ASCIIroids   ASCIIroids
Particle System Designer   PSD (Second Life)
Gravity Bubbles   Gravity Bubbles
FractalNet   FractalNet
EcoSim   EcoSim
Cosmic Dust   Cosmic Dust
LandMesh   LandMesh
Imagencrypter   Imagencrypter
Foxy Detector   Foxy Detector
MacDiff   MacDiff
Asteroid Belt   Asteroid Belt
Matrix Attack   Matrix Attack
Solar Swarm   Solar Swarm
Mac OS X Terminal guide   OS X Terminal
Tools   Tools
Names :-)   Names :-)
Software - Overview

These are some software projects which I have created in my spare time.  Most of them are written in Java, although I have also written some projects in C, JavaScript, PHP and LSL.  Software libraries which I have used in my projects include OpenGL and QuickTime for Java.  Many of these projects were created using Apple’s Xcode IDE.

Guitar Chord Explorer Guitar Chord Explorer

A free online Java program/applet/tool which allows you to explore, search and build hundreds of guitar chords.  Easy to use, with colour-coded displays.  Features include a chord database/dictionary, a voicing builder, a powerful chord search engine, and more.  Dual display – fretboard and chord structure (intervals).  Use any string tuning.  Build unusual custom chords.
Marble Challenge Marble Challenge

A free online Java game, in which you must use a simple paddle to get as many marbles as possible across the screen to the goal, while trying not to let any marbles fall off the bottom of the screen.  Collect 8 different power-ups, including anti-gravity, slow motion, laser forcefield, etc.  The game becomes more difficult as time progresses – the marbles are released faster, and your paddle gets narrower!
ASCIIroids ASCIIroids

A free online side-scrolling shooter JavaScript game, in which you must fly your spaceship through an asteroid belt and destroy as many asteroids as possible.  Power-up your lasers and shields, and buy missiles, gatling guns and orbiting shields.  Attack and destroy alien battleships.  Buy and sell your items in the powerup shop.  One more thing: all the game’s graphics are drawn using only coloured ASCII characters!
Particle System Designer Particle System Designer

A free virtual machine for the virtual world of Second Life, which helps you to design particle systems (animated visual effects that can look like smoke, steam, dust, explosions, flames, sparks, fountains, lasers, and many other things).  Simply touch the buttons on the front to change the parameters.  Outputs LSL code to use in your own objects.  Full documentation included.  Watch the demo video.
Gravity Bubbles Gravity Bubbles

A free online Java toy, in which little coloured bubbles wander around the screen, attracting or repelling each other, and leaving a trail wherever they go.  Watch them go into orbit round each other, or try to get as far apart as possible!  Click and drag your mouse to play with the bubbles, by controlling a super-bubble!
FractalNet FractalNet

A distributed fractal renderer, which generates images and videos of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets.  Includes an online gallery of 152 images, plus some Buddhabrot renders and some videos.  Apparently, it’s an unwritten law that every computer programmer must at some point write their own Mandelbrot/Julia set renderer, so this is my one
EcoSim EcoSim

An ecosystem simulator, featuring flowers, grasses, butterflies, seeds, wind, clouds and rain.  Uses OpenGL for hardware-accelerated graphics.  View some screenshots and a demo video.
Cosmic Dust Cosmic Dust

A simple particle animation system, which generates attractive QuickTime movies of millions of coloured particles interacting with forcefields.  With 2GB of RAM installed, over 100 million particles can be animated, producing very smooth smoke-like effects.  View some stills and several videos.
LandMesh LandMesh

Coming soon.
Imagencrypter Imagencrypter

A visual cryptography program, which takes a greyscale image for its input, and generates two black & white images as its output.  These output images appear to be just random patterns, but when they are overlaid (one on top of the other), the original greyscale image appears as if by magic!
Foxy Detector Foxy Detector

A motion detection program, which monitors the image from a webcam which is watching our garden, and plays an alert sound whenever it detects a moving object which might be our “Foxy”.  Motion sensitivity can be adjusted, and other parameters can be fine-tuned to minimise the number of false positive alerts caused by birds and changes in sunlight.
MacDiff MacDiff

A file-comparison program for Mac OS X, which compares the sizes, modification dates, Spotlight metadata, UNIX filetype, access permissions and byte data of two files (or the contents of two directories).
Asteroid Belt Asteroid Belt

Coming soon.
Matrix Attack Matrix Attack

A partially-created Java game which features the familiar raining code from The Matrix film.
Solar Swarm Solar Swarm

Coming soon.
Mac OS X Terminal guide Mac OS X Terminal guide

A guide documenting some useful commands in the Mac OS X Terminal, including find, fs_usage, ftp, grep, ioreg, ipfw, lame, ls, mdfind, mdls, mplayer, netstat, pmset, stat, telnet and touch.
Tools Tools

I have created many small software tools, which will eventually be documented here.
Names :-) Names :-)

Some amusing online name generators – enjoy!
Contact me  –  Page last updated on 15th August 2008  –  Website hosted by 5quidhost (highly recommended!)
Michael Hogg