ScaleReleased

October 2026Windowsv1.0.0, MIT

A Windows app for exploring fractals. Zoom in as far as you like, type your own equation, and export the result as a 4K image.

$C Sarath Babu (Chidatala Sarath Babu)'s Scale, a fractal explorer for Windows. Three squares, each a zoom into the last: the whole Mandelbrot set in orange and blue, then a spiral on its edge, then finer detail inside it, with orange arrows between them$

Scale is a Windows app for exploring mathematical fractals. You drag to pan, scroll to zoom, and the picture redraws as you move. When you find something you like, you save it as a 4K image.

It is built in C# on .NET 10 with WPF, and it is free and open source.

The idea comes from Michael Fogleman's Scale for macOS. Some of the presets are starting coordinates taken from his app.

Type your own equation

The part I like most is the equation box. You can write a formula in terms of z and c, and Scale draws it.

z^3 / (1 + z^2) + c
sin(z) + c
bar(z)^3 + c

It understands the usual arithmetic, sin, cos, tan, sinh, cosh, exp, sqrt, abs, log and ln, and bar(z) for the complex conjugate. Press Space and it picks a random equation, which is a good way to find shapes you would never think to write.

A glowing blue curved shape on a nearly black background, with a speckled blue edge trailing off below it — A custom equation.

What it can draw

The built-in ones are the classics: Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship, Newton, Tricorn and a transcendental sine map. Each one is a one-line iteration, and they look nothing alike.

A Julia set in bright blues, with a spiral at its centre and fine curled detail along the edges — Julia set, then Newton-Raphson.

A Newton-Raphson fractal in blues, with flower-shaped petals along the boundaries between smooth blue regions, all meeting at one black dot — Julia set, then Newton-Raphson.

A fractal in amber and black, a glowing orange curve wrapped around a dark spike that points left — Rational dynamics, then an algebraic fractal.

A dark purple fractal with a glowing orange edge curving around a black shape on the left — Rational dynamics, then an algebraic fractal.

How it feels to use

Rendering uses every core on your machine, so the picture fills in quickly while you move around. There are several colour palettes, and a gamma control that changes the contrast live.

Everything is on the keyboard as well. Double click zooms in 2x and right click zooms out. Ctrl + C copies the current picture, and Ctrl + Shift + C copies the exact coordinates as text, so you can come back to the same spot later. F11 goes fullscreen.

Saving a picture

Ctrl + S exports a 3840 by 2160 image. It runs in the background with a progress bar, and you can cancel it, so you can keep exploring while a big one renders.

Try it

Download ScaleWindows.exe from the latest release. It runs on 64-bit Windows without installing .NET. If you would rather build it, clone the repository and run dotnet run.

Where it is

It is out as v1.0.0. The code and the first release went up on the same day, and there is a build that publishes the executable every time I push.

Source on GitHub