Features: Pausing computation & optimised thumbnailing

Pausing computation: Provided I'm not missing any existing functionality, is there anybody else who would welcome a pausing feature for 'normal' computations, i.e. outside "Render to Disk"? Sometimes when I was too greedy with open windows, I'd like to be able to prioritise which image actually gets completed first, or I keep a window open for some reason whose computation I'm not currently interested in at all. A hotkey "p" would be all that's needed UI-wise.

Thumbnail refresh: I noticed that any ongoing thumbnail computation is restarted if one saves a new parameter set to the file. Renaming an entry also sometimes leads to the same kind of reload. I admit that mass-processing thumbnails is rare, but this restarting is exacerbated by the fact that only two threads are used for the computation... More threads would especially be useful for feature suggestion #3:

Anti-aliased thumbnails: Being tiny, anti-aliasing of thumbnails should be as affordable as helpful, given how hard it sometimes is to recognise structures in those few pixels. It would essentially be a one-time investment in long-term comfort. And whoever considers the current thumbnails fine could use anti-aliasing to have a similar quality at a smaller size, but fitting more of them on the screen.

Thanks for the feedback! I personally don't like a pause button for calculations -- I think that ideally that shouldn't be necessary. Note that the active fractal window gets a higher priority so it should complete first.

The browser doesn't resume thumbnail calculations if it needs to restart them, but any thumbnails that are already calculated should be saved and not recalculated. So you only lose the progress of the two thumbnails that are currently being calculated. Is that what you're seeing? The browser doesn't use more than two threads by the way to avoid using too much memory when calculating thumbnails -- this could otherwise happen with fractals that use many layers.

Your point about anti-aliased thumbnails is a good one. Note that if you use a High DPI or Retina screen, the thumbnails do use high resolution so anti-aliasing is much less needed.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of the memory aspect in case of layers – not using them, I can't judge what artful constructions would be a challenge for contemporary RAM amounts. But yes, it's nothing serious I was noticing, just that the same thumbnail was recomputed again and again when I saved parameter sets too early.

As for priority of the active fractal window: When there's a slow computation in the background, it may take a few seconds even to even start computation of a new parameter set – I suppose that's because the existing work packages first need to be finished before the core can be reassigned. Anyway, I accept that my use case may be rare, but wanted to have mentioned the pausing idea. If at some point you had a feature poll, it could at least be on the list, far down...

Anti-aliasing of thumbnails is indeed the suggestion I'd consider most worthy among these, as well as those that I haven't posted, yet. ;-) The Retina option I can't test, as I'm still using old-fashioned HD.