This project is deprecated, I realized it's better to use Electron+HTML5+CSS3 to develop cross-platform application.

BlendInt is a lightweight C++ GUI toolkit inspired by Blender for building cross-platform application. It makes use of the modern OpenGL technology, and provides a comprehensive set of widgets that are easily extensible via inheritance.

BlendInt is free software and covered by the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL) v3.

Warning: BlendInt is under heavy development. Support cannot be guaranteed and it may not function as you expect.

Like Blender, all widgets in BlendInt are drawn in OpenGL context and use the same color schemes. Application built with BlendInt has the similar look and feel of Blender, but this project is totally rewritten and only focused on user interface with some new technologies:

• It's based on new OpenGL API (3.3 and later), all widgets are drawn through vertex/fragment/geometry shaders. (Legacy OpenGL APIs which are being used in Blender were removed since GL 3.3)
• It's OOP designed and written by C++, every widget is now a C++ object, you can use the pre-defined UI classes (from a simple button to a MVC based item view), or subclass one of them and customize it easily.
• It uses a fast Event/Delegate (signal/slot) framework.
• It just needs an OpenGL Context, so theoretically you can integrate it in any other GUI framework or toolkit, for example, Glut, GLFW, Qt, Gtk, Cocoa. Currently BlendInt uses GLFW 3.1 to display and manage OpenGL context for some demos and unit tests.

Using BlendInt is as simple as any C++ object-oriented GUI toolkit like Qt, gtkmm. Of course, you must create an OpenGL window first.

Here is a simple example to create an 240x180 pixel window, and show a MessageBox within.

#include <blendint/gui/window.hpp>
#include <blendint/gui/message-box.hpp>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
  using namespace BlendInt;

  if(Window::Initialize()) {

    Window win(240, 180, "Tutorial 01");

    MessageBox* message = new MessageBox("Hello World!",
                                         "Click the \"close\" button.");
    // 'message' will be destroyed when the window is closed.
    win.AddFrame(message);
    message->MoveTo(
        (win.size().width() - message->size().width()) / 2,
        (win.size().height() - message->size().height()) / 2);

    win.Exec();
    Window::Terminate();
  }

  return 0;
}

Compile this code snippet with BlendInt and run in different OS platforms, you'll get a small window with the same context. (In this example, Adobe Source Han Sans CN was loaded in both platforms)

See Wiki page for more information of how to program with BlendInt.

BlendInt is developed with modern OpenGL technology, to run your application linked with BlendInt, you must have a graphics card which supports OpenGL 3.3 or newer.

To build BlendInt, make sure the following development tools and libraries are installed:

Required:

• C++11 compiler
• cmake 2.8.11 or newer
• OpenGL header and libraries, in Linux, Mesa 9.2 or newer
• OpenImageIO 1.1+
• boost (system, filesystem, thread)
• Freetype2
• GLM 0.9.6.0+
• Fontconfig
• GLFW 3.1+

Optional:

• Qt 5.x+
• Opencv
• Doxygen (to build api documentation)

The source code is verified to be built and workable on:

• Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), 10.10 (Yosemite)
• ArchLinux
• Ubuntu 13.10, 14.04(LTS), 15.04
• Fedora 20, 21

See Build the Source in Wiki.

See the contributor page.

• Most source code in this project is released under the LGPL v3 License. See the bundled LICENSE file for details.
• BlendInt use libCppEvent for sending/receiving events between objects, which is released under MIT License.
• RapidXml - The author of RapidXml is Marcin Kalicinski, use of this software is granted under one of the following two licenses: boost software license or MIT license.