The new flame editor 'fr0st' has gone public beta! Growing out of its experimental roots, it's now a fully fledged fractal editor, built on top of flam3 - and it's crossplatform (linux & windows for now). It supports newer flam3 features such as opacity, chaos, color speed, highlight power and early clip, as well as python scripting and integrated flam4 rendering. To download, go to the fr0st launchpad site [link] .

You can give us feedback at the fr0st google group [link] or on Freenode at #fr0st-users.

Also, flam3 2.8 beta 6 was released about a week ago. Here's the changelog.

11/24/09 Potential speedup of 5% over prior versions. Many threading issues identified and resolved when using flam3 shared library as back end for user interfaces. 14 complex plane variations added. auger variation added. new flam3_make_strip library function to generate stripped genomes for external ui strip renders. bug fix: when rendering strips, use the same random context for each strip to prevent edge effects where strips butt against each other. flam3 will now linearly interpolate missing colors in the colormap. Release as 2.8beta6.