openFrameworks

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 developed in a collaborative way. We use git, a distributed versioning system, which means also that people can branch, experiment, and make suggestions. If you look at the network diagram on GitHub, it's looks like some alien diagram, full of weaving branches, code pulling apart and coming together. There's a huge community, all over the world, working on the core code: fixing bugs, submitting pull requests, and shaping the tool the way they want to see it. It's a world wide project, and it's common to wake up in the USA to an inbox full of pull requests and issues emails from coders in Asia and Europe. Over 70 people have contributed to the openFrameworks core directly, and hundreds of people have forked the code or contributed in other ways. openFrameworks tries to balance usability and simplicity. The earliest versions of openFrameworks used the core as a tool for teaching C++ and OpenGL, but over time the examples have become the best way to learn while the core takes advantage of more advanced features. In exchange, we created many more examples that come with openFrameworks, with the goal of trying to make simple, hackable starting points for experimentation. openFrameworks is consistent and intuitive: it should operate on the principle of least surprise, so that what you learn about one part of openFrameworks can be applied to other parts of it. Beginners can use openFrameworks to learn about common programming patterns, and advanced users will be able to apply their experience from other languages and toolkits. openFrameworks is a cross-platform toolkit. openFrameworks supports as many development environments and operating systems as possible. When you download openFrameworks, you can pick your platform and development environment of choice, and have projects and examples ready to learn from and play with. Difficult to port code is kept out of the core, and kept in addons instead. The joy of a cross-platform library is that it's easy to port your ideas from platform to platform. You can sketch on your laptop then immediately run it on your phone. It allows your ideas to come first, without worrying about the grunt work in making something work across platforms. openFrameworks is powerful: it allows you to leverage advanced libraries like OpenCV, use hardware like your graphics card efficiently, and connect peripherals like cameras and other devices. openFrameworks essentially wraps other libraries such as OpenGL, Cairo, FreeType, FreeImage, and OpenCV. You can think of openFrameworks as a layer of code between user code (the code you will write) and these libraries. Those libraries have different styles, idioms, approaches, etc. and our job it to wrap them in a way which makes them more consistent and intuitive. openFrameworks is extensible. When you find something missing from openFrameworks, it's easy to create addons that extend it. The core addons for openFrameworks generally wrap libraries rather than solving problems in novel ways. When openFrameworks wraps libraries, the libraries are left exposed for further hacking. One mental image of openFrameworks is a scaffolding, or shoulders to stand on while building what you want. One thing that helps keep the core light is that rather than try to include everything we can, openFrameworks has an "addon" system that allows for additional code, libraries, approaches, to be shared between users and woven into projects as necessary. An openFrameworks addon can be a snippet of code, or it might wrap much more complex libraries such as OpenNI, Tesseract, or Box2d. Addon names usually begin with the prefix "ofx", allowing you to easily see the difference between "core" code and non core code. In