openFrameworks

Workshop 1: March 7, 10am-1pm
Workshop 2: March 7, 2-5pm
Getting Started with openFrameworks: March 9, 10:30am-noon
www.openframeworks.cc
Presented by Zachary Lieberman, Theodore Watson, and Arturo Castro.

openFrameworks is an open-source tool and C++ framework for creative programming. Especially created for artists and designers, openFrameworks is the ideal starting point for those who want to take their first steps in C++ programming. At the same time, it is an immensely powerful tool for developing more advanced projects, providing a simple and intuitive structure for experimentation with many other open-source libraries. The library is designed to work as a general purpose glue, and wraps together several commonly-used open source libraries within a tidy interface: openGL for graphics, openCV for computer vision, rtAudio for audio analysis and synthesis, freeType for fonts, freeImage for image input and output, Quicktime for video playing and sequence grabbing, and many other free libaries for networking, serial communications, vector graphics output, etcetera.

The code is written to be both cross platform and cross compiler. It works in Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems — and it compiles in readily-downloadable template projects for the free XCode, CodeBlocks, VisualStudio, and gcc compilers. 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 is minimal cross-referening, making it quite easy to rip out and reuse, if you need, or to extend. By providing ready-to-use code templates for multiple operating systems, multiple compilers, and multiple libraries, openFrameworks eliminates one of the greatest hassles of C++ programming: simply getting diverse libraries to compile together!