Mandelbrot Madness!

Version 2.0 -- Command Overview: The Options Menu

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The Main Window Options Menu

The Options menu is the home of many of MM!'s user-customizations. This version is much more flexible that its predecessors and it remembers all of your settings in a convenient configuration file. You can display toolbars, specify default directories for your various files, define your helper applications, and several other useful items.

Toolbars: MM! has two toolbars, the Main Toolbar and the Render Toolbar, as well as a status bar at the bottom. Of course, some of you may not find these as convenient an addition as I have :) so I've included an option where you can disable each one. Choosing the item produces a submenu or "tear-away" menu with checkbox items for each toolbar. Uncheck the box to disable the stated toolbar. Checking the box again will re-enable it.

Folders: Another unique feature of MM! is the user-defined default folders. When you first run MM!, it will default to always looking for parameter and palette files in your "My Documents" folder. Over time, when you create many exciting images, this could make this folder very cluttered. Instead, you can define default folders for parameter, palette, and image files. These defaults can all point to the same folder (and there's a convenient option to do this), or you can specify separate folders for each one. This way, you can keep all these items in their own places, making it much easier to organize your files. Choose each option to specify where you want to set these folders.

Parameter Files...: This folder is where MM! will, by default, look for parameter files, or the default folder for saving them. Of course, during the opening and saving process, you can load files from other folders, but setting a default can make looking for files much easier.
Palette Files...: This folder is where MM! will save and load PAL files by default. Note that while you can specify a different folder while saving palette files, MM! will always look in this folder while loading them! This means if you save a palette file to a different folder other that the default when you save a set of parameters, MM! may not be able to find that palette later. (The MMJ file format does not save folder information when storing the palette file name, because folder information can be platform specific and may break when the files are shared across platforms.) In other words, it is always a good idea to put all your palette files in one place and set this option to that folder. When sending files to others, you must make sure to get both the parameter file and the palette file and keep them together; when receiving files from others, you should always put the palette file in your default palette folder. (Note that MOB and MM XML files do not have this problem, since palettes are stored internally.)
Image Files...: This folder is where MM! will save image files by default. As with the parameter files above, you can always specify a different folder at the time of your save, but this option sets where MM! will first open your file system.
Set all folders to the same...: Some users like to keep all their MM! files in the same place, regardless of the type. (I've been known to do this often myself.) This menu item provides a shortcut to setting all three of the above options to the same folder. Internally, MM! will still treat these settings as separate and unique, but they just happen to point to the same place. Of course, if you decide to split your files out later, you can simply manually set each folder type with the options above.

Other Options...: In addition to these options, there are several more miscellaneous options that you can set to tweak how MM! does things. To change these settings, you can choose this item to launch the Options Dialog Box. There, you can change a few of MM!'s default behaviors, such as default file formats, whether or not MM! will ask you to save your parameters when you close image windows, and manually setting the various helper application locations.

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