openFrameworks is an open source C++ toolkit designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation. The toolkit is designed to work as a general purpose glue, and wraps together several commonly used libraries, including:
- OpenGL, GLEW, GLUT, libtess2 and cairo for graphics
- rtAudio, PortAudio, OpenAL and Kiss FFT or FMOD for audio input, output and analysis
- FreeType for fonts
- FreeImage for image saving and loading
- Quicktime, GStreamer and videoInput for video playback and grabbing
- Poco for a variety of utilities
- OpenCV for computer vision
- Assimp for 3D model loading
The code is written to be massively cross-compatible. Right now we support five operating systems (Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, Android) and four IDEs (XCode, Code::Blocks, and Visual Studio and Eclipse). The API is designed to be minimal and easy to grasp.
openFrameworks is distributed under the MIT License. This gives everyone the freedoms to use openFrameworks in any context: commercial or non-commercial, public or private, open or closed source. While many openFrameworks users give their work back to the community in a similarly free way, there is no obligation to contribute.
Simply put, openFrameworks is a tool that makes it much easier to make things with code. We find it super useful, and we hope you do too.