About openFrameworks

What is it?

openFrameworks is an open-source, C++ toolkit for creative coding — the kind of code artists, designers and students reach for to build interactive installations, generative visuals, sound-reactive work, physical computing projects, and other real-time, graphics-heavy software. It's free, cross-platform (macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android and Raspberry Pi), and has been maintained by a volunteer community since 2005. The core toolkit itself lives at github.com/openframeworks/openFrameworks.

What it gives you

Rather than reinvent the basics, openFrameworks bundles together well-established libraries for the things creative coding projects need most, behind one consistent, approachable C++ API. You get a window and a render loop in a few lines, then build up from there. Some of what's included:

OpenGL / GLFW / GLEW — windowing and the graphics pipeline
rtAudio — cross-platform realtime audio input/output
FreeType — font loading and text rendering
FreeImage — loading/saving common image formats
assimp — importing 3D model formats (obj, fbx, dae, and more)
Poco — networking, filesystem, and threading utilities
Cairo — 2D vector graphics rendering
curl / OpenSSL — HTTP(S) requests
glm — vector/matrix math for graphics
tess2 — polygon tessellation and triangulation
RapidJSON — JSON parsing

Recent changes

The latest commits to the core toolkit's default branch:

See the full commit history →

Where addons fit in

The core toolkit stays intentionally small. Anything more specialized — support for a particular camera or sensor, a physics engine, a computer-vision pipeline, a GUI library — lives instead in an addon: a self-contained folder of code that drops into an openFrameworks project and extends it. Addon names conventionally start with ofx (e.g. ofxKinect, ofxBox2d).

That convention is exactly what this site is built around: ofxAddons crawls GitHub for ofx-prefixed repositories and organizes them into a browsable, searchable directory, so finding the addon you need doesn't mean guessing at GitHub search terms.

Getting started

The official download page has setup instructions and IDE-specific project generators for every supported platform, and the community-written ofBook is a solid next step once you're up and running. From there, our own How To page covers installing and managing addons specifically.

A note on this site

ofxAddons is an independent, fan-run project. It isn't part of the official openFrameworks toolkit and isn't operated or endorsed by the openFrameworks project or its maintainers — it's simply a directory built on top of the public GitHub metadata for ofx-prefixed repositories, to make that ecosystem easier to browse.