Icedcoffee v0.7.1

Icedcoffee is a lightweight framework for building stunning, accelerated 2D and 3D user interfaces based on OpenGL ES 2. It is written in Objective-C and runs on iOS and Mac OS X. Among its most notable features are: perspective UI rendering, sophisticated shader-based picking and hit tests, full event handling for all drawable objects, buffering of views via OpenGL render textures, and advanced font rendering and typesetting using a crossover of CoreText and GL-backed glyph caches.

Icedcoffee essentially gives you full control of what's on screen by unlocking the power of graphics hardware without forcing you to deal with the details of OpenGL – it's a perfect match for every developer reaching the limits of UIKit and CoreAnimation.

Icedcoffee is designed to be clean, minimalistic, consistent and reusable for different purposes. It may be used to build interfaces for games, full application frontends or to extend existing applications with new OpenGL-based components such as infinitely scrollable views, animated overlays, and so on. Icedcoffee emphasizes easy integration and doesn't hijack your application. Promised!

Icedcoffee is open source and free for both non-commercial and commercial use (MIT license).

Note: This is an early release, which means that some things aren't quite finished yet.

Getting Started

Pull the code from github: the easiest way to stay updated is to use Git Read-only by typing git clone git://github.com/starbugs/icedcoffee.git on the terminal.
Open icedcoffee.xcworkspace using Xcode 4.2 or newer.
Pick and run some of the tests and have fun!

Documentation

Find a work-in-progress version of the Icedcoffee API reference on icedcoffee-framework.org. If you have questions or want to receive updates and release notes via email, please join the Icedcoffee Google Group.

Main Features

View hierarchy with stencil-based clipping, optionally backed by render textures
Font rendering via OpenGL-backed glyph caches, typesetting and framesetting via CoreText
Easy and convenient property animations
Full event handling support for all nodes, views and controls (multi-touch, mouse, keyboard), responder chain design similar to that found in Cocoa/CocoaTouch
Target-action control event handling for user interface controls
Shader-based picking/selection (arbitrary picking shapes)
Render to texture, picking through (potentially nested) texture FBOs
Render to texture and picking with depth and stencil buffer support
Perspective UI rendering via UI cameras (XY world plane matches the screen plane)
Scale9 sprites for scaling background images and sprite textures
Asynchronous texture loading
Rendering via display link or timers (dedicated thread or main thread)
Retina display support
GPUImage integration for efficiently displaying and filtering camera inputs and movie files
View/view controller architecture for easy integration with Cocoa/CocoaTouch
Drawing to multiple AppKit/UIKit host views using multiple OpenGL contexts
Minimalistic scene graph: scene node infrastructure with arbitrary 3D transforms, easily extensible via node visitation
Little dependencies: very easy to integrate into existing OpenGL and non-OpenGL applications or games

Copyright and License

Licensed under an MIT license (see LICENSE_icedcoffee.txt for details).

Third-party Sources