Zach Lieberman releases OpenFrameworks v0.01

With a decade titled the “Tooling Era,” tools clearly played a critical role in this decade’s impact on the history of generative thinking and art. Along with Processing, that was developed at MIT’s ACG by Casey Reas and Ben Fry under John Maeda, openFrameworks was developed a few years later by Zach Lieberman, who had spent much of his early career collaborating with former Parsons professor Golan Levin. Levin also studied at ACG under Maeda. On August 3, 2005, Zach Lieberman released OpenFrameworks v0.01; Theodore Watson and Arturo Castro joined afterwards. To this day, the release of openFrameworks represents a significant move to bolster the creative coding community. It’s an open-source C++ toolkit designed to streamline the creative process. The comprehensive framework integrates several widely used libraries, facilitating tasks in graphics, audio, video and computer vision across multiple platforms, including Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS and Android. The language aims at making coding more accessible and fostering a collaborative and extensible development environment focused on inclusion. Like Processing, the software is open source, ensuring an open ecosystem of learning and sharing, which is foundational to the history of computing outside of military laboratories.