Blog
Amethyst 1.3 - First Look (locales)
We’ll soon be releasing the first public beta of a major update to the Amethyst IDE for the Adobe Flash Platform.
Amethyst 1.3 is the biggest single update since the release of Amethyst 1.0. The principal changes are:
Better support for modules
Better support for resources
CSS compilation to SWFs now supported
Flex 4 Locale bundles added as references
Enhanced property pages
Library dependencies calculated automatically
Runtime Shared Libraries (RSLs) now fully supported
Project library IntelliSense now fully implemented
Major improvements to Project Importer
We’ll have more to say about these features on the Blog shortly. Today I want to provide a first look at our support for Flex 4 locales.
Locales take the form of named directories in the Flex 4 SDK each of which contains a number of SWCs which provide regional language support - for example, to ensure that the OK, Yes and Cancel buttons on standard dialogs are displayed in an appropriate language. Up to now users have had to apply a locale by adding a compiler option. This struck us as a bit uncivilised and not really the way that you would expect Visual Studio to work. So, in Amethsyt 1.3 we have completely re-implemented locale support to integrate locales with the Solution Explorer and Property panel.
Let’s see an example. Here is some code that displays an Alert dialog with a Yes, No and Cancel button:
With no locale, the labels on those buttons will display null, which isn’t very useful. With the en_US locale they will show English labels: Yes, No, Cancel. But what if you want to distribute your programs in Italy, Japan or Germany? Well, in Amethyst 1.3, you just select the locale node in Solution Explorer (this automatically adds all the appropriate SWCS as references) and then pick a different locale in the Property panel...
The end result is that it is now trivially easy to switch between different locales. Here’s our Alert in French...
And here it is in Chinese....
The first beta of Amethyst 1.3 will be available in a few days and will be announced on the Blog. All point updates to Amethyst 1.x are free to registered users.
