RemObjects Software CEO Steve (Scotty) Scott has blogged this month to detail the status of project about Fire. Late last autumn, Fire was promoted to be an “official company project”, then this Spring, it went out to dedicated external testers. Now, while still considered to be in Beta status, it’s being made available to every Oxygene and RemObjects C# user as part of their active subscription.
Fire is a Mac native app — and (says Scott) you could also say that Fire is a new IDE for Oxygene and RemObjects C# that runs on Mac OS X.
So why was Fire initiated? Scott says that he had been a Mac user for a long time but always kept a Windows VM around to run Visual Studio. “I really wanted to break out of that and develop in Oxygene (and more recently RemObjects C#) directly on my Macs. On my laptop, a VM is way too much overhead, so I never bothered installing one; but even on the desktop, it’s annoying to always have your IDE in a box.”
Scott explains that while he (kinda) likes Visual Studio and loves Xcode, he had his own ideas about what would make an IDE great. For version 1.0 he focused on “lightweightness” and the IDE not getting in his way.
With regard to Apple’s Swift programming language for Mac and iOS, Scott says he thought about what would be involved in bringing Swift into the Elements language family as a third member.
This has lead to his team pre-announcing “Silver”, a project to bring the Swift language to Android/Java and .NET developers (and it will work on Cocoa too, for completeness sake). In essence, any place where you can use Oxygene or RemObjects C# now, you’ll be able to use Swift as well. And it will of course work in both Visual Studio and Fire.
