Development Environments

Silver comes with a couple of great choices for your development environment.

For developers on Mac, we have Fire, our lean, mean and powerful Mac IDE.

Fire is the best way to experience Elements, and our favorite way to develop on the Mac. It is powerful, yet lightweight enough to run great on a 12" MacBook Adorable. It provides all the features you need to create great apps, and fully supports all development for all the target platforms mentioned above.

If you prefer working on Windows, there's Water.

Water is the Windows IDE, rethought from the ground up. It brings the same light-weight development experience from Fire to Windows and it lets you target all platforms supported by Elements, including Mac and iOS, right from your Windows PC.

Fire and and Water are siblings of sorts, as they epitomize the approach Elements takes to multi-platform development: they share virtually all their code (and much of their design philosophy), yet are fully native on their respective operating systems – 100% Cocoa on Mac, and 100% WPF on Windows.

For Windows developers who like Visual Studio, Elements also integrates into that IDE, allowing you to use Swift next to Visual C# or Visual Basic, for example, right in Visual Studio 2015 or 2017.