Amethyst Visual Studio Flash Platform IDE - New Beta

Amongst numerous new features, the latest release of Amethyst provides dedicated property editors available from the Visual Studio Property panel. These allow developers to manipulate complex properties such as the pages of an Accordion or the rows and items of a Grid. Amethyst adopts the standards and conventions of Visual Studio to provide an environment that is familiar and accessible to experienced Visual Studio users. The addition of property editors is an important step in realising this goal.

Principal New Features

The main new features in Amethyst beta 7 are:

 Support for Navigators
 Support for complex controls such as Grids and DataGrids
 Property editors (e.g. for columns of a DataGrid or the containers/pages of a Navigator)
 Property ‘load’ dialogs (e.g. for Images)
 Other dedicated property editors (e.g. Color Pickers)
 Borders drawn over invisible object boundaries (e.g. canvas/checkbox)
 Design-grid options can be set instantly from Amethyst Layout bar
 Project references (for builds with dependent projects - use ’Add Reference’ in the Solution Explorer, then select Projects tab)
 MSBuild works from command line (for automated builds)
 Project paths are now relative (to simplify code sharing with other users)
 Amethyst Cylon Debugger - 1st view of our exclusive new debugger (more features to be announced later)
 A variety of minor bug fixes and improvements

See Guide To New Features

These features are in addition to all the features from the previous beta including:

 IntelliSense
 Refactoring
 Auto-expand code snippets with an ActionScript snippet editor
 Automatic code (user configurable) formatting
 GoTo/Find all References
 Extensive Project Build properties
 Extensive customizable code colouring
 Code collapsing
 Bracket matching
 Drill-down Debugging
 Multi-level undo/redo (both code and design)
 Project Importer
 Project ‘convert in place’ (e.g. to share code with another IDE such as Flex Builder)

For Download and installation instructions go to The Amethyst Download Page

For an overview of Amethyst, refer to A Brief Guide To Amethyst

Be sure to read the Readme.html file supplied in the download zip for more information.