We are incredibly excited to announce that Cinder (formerly known as Flint) has now officially been released into the wild as an open source project. As described on the main page at libcinder.org, “Cinder is a community-developed, free and open source library for professional-quality creative coding in C++.”

So why did we do this, you might ask? Well, it originated as a solution to a fairly kludge-y work-flow we were using to create music visualizers. We were basically designing in Processing, porting to C++ and testing; repeat. At one point we even considered developing a magic-box type macro that would convert a Processing sketch into C++ and then to an iTunes visualizer. I had also coded a basically blank iTunes visualizer that piped FFT data to processing. Good times, but not ideal. At all.

Instead, we started an internal project codenamed ‘Flint ’ (not only because we liked the name, but because the namespace sounded cool: fli::Surface, etc). The project had two main goals:

First, when we needed to be in C++ (for iTunes plug-ins etc.) we wanted to have our creative coders be able to make things directly in C++. It needed to be approachable. For a while, we called this “The Robert Case” after Robert Hodgin, who was a driving force in making a ton of amazing stuff here at TBG.

Second, we wanted to make sure that any approachability enhancements did not prevent the more hardcore developers from doing the “bare-metal” programming. That was the “AFB Case” after Andrew Bell, who wrote the majority of Cinder here, and has been writing C++ code for ever.

We’ve used various incarnations of Cinder on projects like the augmented reality issue of Esquire Magazine, a music visualizer for Relentless, and Magnetosphere, as well as several internal experiments.

I would also like to reiterate some things that we’ve said in the FAQ of libcinder.org. One, we cannot say enough great things about Processing. It’s not only a great way to dip your toe into the waters of creative coding, but also a powerful platform for doing advanced and amazing things. Another incredible project out there is openFrameworks, which is led by some amazingly talented people and has a great community surrounding it.

I am so glad that we were able to make Cinder open source. Andrew and I both expected a certain amount of internal resistance attempting to do so (a lot of hours went into this!), but that resistance never materialized. We have been the beneficiaries of too many open source projects to list, and we all felt that giving back was the only move we could feel good about.

Check out the cinder website here: http://libcinder.org
Grab the source here: http://github.com/cinder/Cinder