View style

The list of items in the browser can display the items with different view styles, just like in the Mac OS X Finder or Windows Explorer.

To change the view style, click a new view style on the View menu. You can also click one of the View buttons on the tool bar.

  Click Thumbnails to display the items as large thumbnails that contain a preview of the item.
  Click Details to display the items in a list with columns that contain more information on each item, such as the date, author and comments. You can click on a column header to sort the items by the information in that column.

By default, Ultra Fractal generates thumbnails for formulas and classes based upon the current layer. This shows exactly how the layer would look if that formula or class was selected. Although this feature is very helpful, it makes it impossible for the browser to cache the thumbnails: they have to be regenerated each time. To allow the browser to cache the thumbnails, you can turn off the "Base preview on current layer where possible" option per formula type in the Browser tab of the Preferences dialog.

Whenever possible, the browser remembers the thumbnails that it generates for parameter files, fractal files and formulas, so they only have to calculated once. The thumbnails are stored in the preview cache that is also used for the preview image in the bottom-right corner of the browser.

You can adjust the size of the preview cache in the Browser tab of the Preferences dialog. If you have many parameter sets that you view regularly, you might want to increase the cache size, although this uses more space on your hard disk. You can also turn off thumbnail caching for formulas to leave more space in the cache for parameter and fractal thumbnails which are more time-consuming to regenerate.

Next: Opening files and entries

See Also
Browsers