openFrameworks - open source C++ toolkit for creative coding

Openframeworks is a c++ library designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation.

The library is designed to work as a general purpose glue, and wraps together several commonly used libraries under a tidy interface: openGL for graphics, rtAudio for audio input and output, freeType for fonts,freeImage for image input and output, quicktime for video playing and sequence grabbing.

The code is written to be both cross platform (PC, Mac, Linux, iPhone) and cross compiler. The API is designed to be minimal and easy to grasp. There are very few classes, and inside of those classes, there are very few functions. The code has been implemented so that within the classes there are minimal cross-referening, making it quite easy to rip out and reuse, if you need, or to extend.

Simply put, openFrameworks is a tool that makes it much easier to make things via code. We find it super useful, and we hope you do too.

OpenFrameworks is actively developed by Zach Lieberman, Theodore Watson, and Arturo Castro, with help from the OF community. ofxIphone, is actively developed by Mehmet Akten and Zach Gage, with development help from Lee Byron and Damian Stewart. The OF website is designed and maintained by Chris O’shea.

OpenFrameworks is indebted to two significant precursors: the Processing development environment, created by Casey Reas, Ben Fry and the Processing community; and the ACU Toolkit, a privately distributed C++ library developed by Ben Fry and others in the MIT Media Lab’s Aesthetics and Computation Group.