After hearing Andrew Bell's (@drawnline) inspiring talk on creative coding at Eyeo 2012 and discussing UI design with Alex Beim , I was motivated to port ofxUI (originally developed for openFrameworks) toCinder. If you’re not familiar with ofxUI, it’s a library that provides a variety of widgets and layout methods to build aesthetically pleasing, clean, and usable interfaces. I’ve always admired the beautiful work produced using Cinder, particularly Robert Hodgin'svisual experiments, and was curious to see how Cinder handles shaders, textures, FBOs, VBOs, and image manipulation. Porting ofxUI to Cinder not only presented an opportunity to explore these features but also allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of Cinder’s architecture and design philosophy.

ciUI was a Cinder Block (for version 0.8.4) that simplified the process of creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It provided features such as variable binding, widget layout, spacing, font loading, color theming, settings management, and widget callbacks. ciUI was designed to be minimal, flexible, and easily customizable, making it a robust tool for building elegant and responsive interfaces in Cinder projects.