Today sees a milestone in my Swift development journey: my first Swift app, ReDiLab, is now available at the App Store for A7 and A8 based iPads.
ReDiLab is a reaction diffusion explorer. It allows users to adjust the parameters to three well known reaction diffusion models, Gray-Scott, Fitzhugh-Nagumo and Belousov-Zhabotinsky. Different configurations of parameters can be saved with an accompanying thumbnail image.
Not only is ReDiLab free of charge, it's also open source.
ReDiLab uses Apple's Metal framework to execute up to 1,000 solver iterations per second.
I've blogged about the development over the last few months, so for more information on how I created ReDiLab, take a look at the following posts:
- Metal Kernel Functions / Compute Shaders in Swift
- Reaction Diffusion Cellular Automata with Metal Compute Shaders
- Swift & Metal: 1,000 Reaction Diffusion Solver Iterations per Second
- Swift and Core Data: Saving Data with Thumbnail Previews
Admittedly, reaction diffusion simulations aren't going to appeal to a mass audience, but I've long been fascinated by the emergent patterns created by some pretty simple arithmetic. Apart from it's interest to academics, I can see ReDiLab being used for animated texture generation and, to that end, I plan to add support to create movies from simulations in the near future.
Meanwhile, my Swift version of Nodality, the node based image editing and compositing application for iPads, is going from strength to strength. The new Nodality will still be free, but not open source. That said, an embryonic version of it is publicly available at my GitHub repository here.
I'm planning to launch the new Nodality before Christmas, if you can't wait that long, here's a sneak peek of the user interface being used for some simple arithmetic:
To keep an eye on my work with Swift, follow me on Twitter: I'm @FlexMonkey
If you enjoy ReDiLab, please leave a review :)
