I am interested in building a music visualiser using fractal patterns for my final year project. I have googled quite a lot on it and I know a bit about fractals, however I was wondering what software would be used to ‘animate’ the graphics.
I know Java has a drawing API (AWT and Swing), but it’s probably not the best for the animation factor. On the other hand there is also Flash that has new capabilities within as3 to produce such an effect, but if this app was to traverse into mobile development Flash wouldn’t be a great choice. So there still exists a gray patch in my head regarding actual app development. Can anyone give me a head’s up on where to start looking?
I would suggest that you first define what it is you want to build and then choose the best technology for the task. For audio visualization you will most likely be using some kind of Fourier data. This and the fractal math concepts should translate across programming languages well.
I will often build prototypes in ActionScript or Python just to understand the fundamentals of new topics. Once I have an understanding of the concepts and know the target platform, the prototypes are usually very helpful and sometimes can be easily ported over.
As for quickly prototyping audio visualizations you could use Processing ( java based ), openFrameworks ( c++ ), Cinder ( c++ ) or Flash.
Each of these technologies are cross-platform, allow you to read audio data in realtime, quickly create windows and provide easy to use drawing APIs.
Also, it sounds like you are thinking about mobile. I believe that both Cinder and openFrameworks can be used for iPhone development. As well, AS3 can be compiled into an AIR app which will run on the Android platform. Performance of Flash on Android devices varies greatly from device to device though.