Which is your favorite fractal program, and why?

My favorite prog is TieraZon. It's easy to use (you don't have to be an expert in fractal geometry), so I offer it to beginners, like me.

I downloaded the demo for UltraFractal, and it looks interesting, but 50 dollars seems a bit steep. You call still get Fractint for free, and it does a lot of things. I'll check out Sterlingware.

I use UltraFractal because it has the best user interface for my own coding. It is possible to write code many thousand lines long that does what I want. I do not know of any other program that gives me this amount of freedom. And the layering possibilities are also very great.

I'm partial to the freeware program, Fractal Explorer. It is definately among the best--if not the best--of the freeware fractal programs available. As the programmers don't speak English very well, they have paid particular attention to ease of use. There are now 'mouse over' context help for almost every feature. New versions, including Betas, are avalable rather frequently, always adding new features. It makes available literally hundreds of established formulas, some 55 Sterling equations and supports user defined formulas. It also supports IFS constuctors, 3D attractors and Quaternations as well. At the price, it's definitely worth a try. The URL to the home site is: www.eclectasy.com/Fractal-Explorer/index.html. Just my 2,000 cents (adjusted for inflation. :)).

I've been playing with an evaluation version of Visions of Chaos because it does 3D versions of the fractals that are neat to play with. Since I'm clueless about how to use the other programs, I couldn't figure out how to get the UltraFractal program to do the same thing. I'm desperately in need of fractals for dummies.