openFrameworks + iPhone

I’ve heard about openFrameworks 0.6 (as of yet unreleased) and specifically efforts to support building apps using oF for the iPhone. There are a few developers who have published videos of their efforts and even several apps in the AppStore.

Memo Atken has a very informative article about setting up the prerelease 0.6 version for use with the ofxiPhone addon. However, there is a HUGE simplification of the steps necessary for getting the supporting libraries installed for use with iPhone.

Update: freetype/freeimage building instructions have been posted.

GLU, FreeType and FreeImage need to be built for use with the iPhone. GLU has a nice iPhone specific project and worked flawlessly. I looked around to see if there were ARM/iPhone built versions of the FreeImage and FreeType libraries already available, but couldn’t find anything. In the end, I hacked up their respective Makefiles and configure options and eventually got everything compiled. I’ve never had to manually cross-compile code, and I don’t *actually* know what I’m doing…but I can sure copy-paste like a fiend.

Eventually, I’ll post the specific changes I made, but I want to test it a bit before I expose my embarrassing level of hackery. In the meantime let me know if you’re itching to get your own environments set up and I’ll do what I can.

For my “hello world” app I ported the particle system from the TrafficFlow project over to the iPhone. It was originally written using oF 0.5 and c++ in xcode, so it was relatively trivial to update for the iPhone with the ofxiPhone addon. I’m using ofx-dev as the codebase. Using the built-in multi touch library sure beats building the computer vision tracking we’re using for the table! Teaser video below.