I’m incredibly pleased to announce the immediate availability of Elements 8.2, the next major update to our beloved multi-platform compiler tool chain.
Version 8.2 is the culmination of over six months of hard work from the team, building on the strong 8.0 and 8.1 releases earlier this year.
With three new sub-platforms (tvOS, watchOS and Windows 10 Universal Apps), support for Apple’s latest Swift 2.1, and literally hundreds of other improvements and fixes all across the products, I’m extremely proud with what the team has accomplished. As one customer, who has been on the beta, told me last week:
While I’m issuing praise: I’ve been doing all my coding exclusively in Elements for the past 6-12 months, and this latest 8.2 beta has been rock solid. The team has really been awesome on the latest versions.
Nothing makes us more happy about all the hard work we put in, than to hear praise like this.
Let’s have a look some of the cool new things in 8.2
Apple shipped two new platforms this year, and I’m really thrilled that we’re able to ship support for both of them in this release: Apple TV and Apple Watch. I just finished building my first watchOS app myself (an internal project for business status, with a custom watch face complication – very cool), and it works really well. And I’m really excited to see what kind of tvOS apps will be coming from all of you.
We’re also shipping some major new functionality on the Windows side. For one, we’ve brought the WinForms designer — previously only in Oxygene — to Swift and RemObjects C# as well. Apart from building Windows GUIs, this also now lets Swift and C# developers use the non-visual component designer, such as for Windows NT Services.
More excitingly than WinForms is support for the new Windows 10 “Universal Application Platform”, or UAP for short. Use Oxygene, Swift or C# to build modern apps for Windows and Windows Mobile, to take advantage of the upswing the Windows ecosystem is seeing with Windows 10.
The Silver compiler, the youngest of our three sibling languages, has been updated with support for all the cool new language features Apple introduced with its Swift 2.0. From official exception handling syntax, over guard statements, to filtered for loops and extended case support – it’s all there, and of course on all platforms.
All the languages have seen improvements and enhancements. We now have labeled break and continue statements in Oxygene and C# (and Swift got them as part of version 2.0), and we vastly expanded the usefulness of non-nullable types, as well.
If that wasn’t enough, Fire is making great progress and is now available as Preview 2, lightyears ahead of the version from July. And for our developers on Windows, Elements 8.2 now ships with the brand-new Visual Studio 2015 Shell, in the box.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Check out our What’s New summary and the complete change log for more.
Get it now!
As always, Elements 8.2 is a free update for all users with an active subscription, and Silver 8.2 is of course entirely free to everyone. You can download it here.
Yours,
marc
