openFrameworks is an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding.

download the library

Grab the most recent release (0.8.4) and follow the setup guide for your operating system to get openFrameworks running.

read the documentation

Reference for openFrameworks classes, functions and addons. You can also check the tutorials section.

browse the forum

The forum is a place to meet other people working with openFrameworks. It's a place to share your work, or find help solving problems.

openFrameworks is designed to assist the creative process by providing a framework for experimentation.

We’ve designed openFrameworks to work as general purpose glue, wrapping 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

We’ve written the code to be massively cross-compatible. Currently 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.