Fire is our brand new development environment for programmers using the Elements compiler: Oxygene, C# and Silver (Swift).
Fire was written from the ground up to be a fresh new look at what an integrated development environment could look like. It takes some of the best ideas from other IDEs we love and use, including Xcode and Visual Studio, and combines them with unique new ideas that we believe will help improve developer workflow.
One of the fundamental principles of Fire is that it will never get in your way. It is written to be lean and mean, always responsive and mode-less. That means that you will never be pulled out of your flow – for example, you can hit ?B to build the current state of your project, and just keep on coding, without Fire pulling you away from the code you are looking at.
Fire has new and unique navigation models for moving around your code and managing files. For example, it does away with tabs of open files, and it seamlessly updates files to (and from) disk as you code, without you having to press ?S ever again.
Fire is not based on an existing IDE framework (such as how we use the Visual Studio Shell on Windows); it was built from the ground up here at RemObjects and is written in 100% Elements code, mostly RemObjects C#, using the native Cocoa edition of our compiler.
And most of the work writing Fire has been done in Fire.
Fire itself is a completely native app that always feels at home on the Mac. Underneath the hood, it shares the same compiler and "IDE smarts" engine that Elements uses everywhere, written in cross-platform managed code and hosted using our internal Marzipan and Infrared™ technologies.
Fire supports OS X Yosemite, El Capitan and later.
Fire supports all three of our Elements languages – Oxygene, C# and Swift. It supports each of those languages for all three of our target platforms: .NET/Mono, Cocoa and Java/Android.
This makes Fire interesting not just to Cocoa developers, but also to:
and many others.
As mentioned above, Fire runs under Yosemite and later. There are no external dependencies for running Fire itself. You can just download Fire.app and run it.
There are some pre-requisites, depending on the platforms you want to develop for. For example, if you want to build Java and Android apps, you will want to have the Java 7 or 8 SDK and the Android SDK installed; if you want to run/debug .NET/Mono apps, you will need to have Mono 3.x or later installed. Xcode 6 or later needs to be installed to build iOS and Mac apps.
You can read more about setting up for your platform(s) here.
As of the release of Elements 8.3, Fire preview is now available officially. You can download it as a free trial (for Oxygene and C#), and use it completely for free with our free Silver compiler, here.
Fire will work with your existing Elements or Suite licenses to unlock the full Oxygene and C# functionality.
If you have an up-to-date subscription to Elements, Oxygene or RemObjects C# or a Suite Subscription for .NET, Cocoa or Java, you can also get more frequent and recent beta updates on our beta portal. (If you're not a licensed Elements user yet, or if your subscription has lapsed, then now is a great time to change that).
Fire is still evolving rapidly, with improvements happening almost every week, so we recommend checking out the betas.
Your best place to get started with Fire, and Elements in general, is our documentations site at docs.elementscompiler.com.
In particular, check out the Fire section and our "First App" Tutorials.
Please use our dedicated Fire forum on Talk to provide feedback and ask questions about Fire. Of course you can also always contact us directly at info@remobjects.com.
Join our Water mailing list to stay in the loop and informed about all new developments around Water as it becomes available.