Announcing Elements 8.1, with Swift and Fire

Don’t let the .1 version number trick you, Elements 8.1 is a significant and major update that brings a wide range of features and improvements, building on our 8.0 release late last year. From support for Visual Studio 2015 to IDE-integrated Help, from new language features in Oxygene to full support for C# 6.0 syntax, from Android GUI designer integration to iOS Extension templates, there’s bound to be something new and exciting for everybody.

But of course the most significant new feature in Elements 8.1 is Silver, our implementation of Apple’s Swift programming language.

With Silver, Swift joins the ranks of Oxygene and C# as a third Elements language, and is supported across all three platforms, and with all the bells and whistles you have come to expect from Elements. What’s more, we have decided to make Silver completely free to use for everyone — it will be included for free in your active Elements subscription, and new users who are interested only in Swift can use Silver without requiring an Elements license at all.

The second major new thing shipping with Elements 8.1 — and very close to my heart personally, because it represents the last years of my work – is Fire. Fire is our new native development environment for the Mac, written and designed from the ground up for Elements around our ideas of what a modern and lightweight IDE should look like in 2015. Fire is designed to be fast and nimble, yet powerful.

Fire is not quite ready for the “1.0” moniker yet, so the current version is still considered a preview – but it’s a production stable preview that you should be able to use for your day-to-day work (I personally have been working exclusively in Fire since the beginning of 2014 – that’s 16 months now). Even though still in preview, Fire is available as free public trial download now, and also supports the free Silver compiler – in addition to, of course, Oxygene and C#.

Get Elements 8.1 now

Elements 8.1 is available for download now – both for Windows with Visual Studio, and for Mac inside Fire. You can grab your copy at http://elementscompiler.com/download.

Yours,

marc hoffman
Chief Architect,
RemObjects Software