Golly 4+

I looked at every Conway’s Game of Life app, and this is by far the best. Not only does it allow a huge field that’s very easy to zoom in to draw, but you can switch between Draw and Move modes so you don’t accidentally draw while you’re trying to zoom in or out. Of course it comes with all the other features you’d expect but a lot of GOL don’t have.

A pretty large library of patterns comes with it, and as a bonus there’s documentation on each pattern.

And best of all, you can even change the ruleset to explore other interesting universes.

To those of you NOT already familiar with Conway's Game of Life, this is not an actual game. It is a simulation of cellular automata. You'll want to do a bit of research before you'll want this app. I suggest running a glider with pencil and graph paper for a few generations, so that you really appreciate this app. :-)

I downloaded a bunch of GOLs, and this is "the one". Infinite universe (no wrapping), amazing zoom/pan, amazing speed, amazing library of patterns, great user interface. I can't think of any improvements that don't involve telepathy.

I've been using Golly on my desktop since 2008. It is, without competition, the best program for discovering and simulating 2D cellular automat. The intuitive yet powerful Rule Table format for defining rules, combined with scripting, make it excellent for finding interesting rules, and the Python scripting combined with Hashlife make discovering and engineering patterns easier than in any other program I have used.