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Free Flex IDE (PE) v Flex Visual Design Environment (Pro)
We are now coming to close to finalizing the feature set of Amethyst Personal Edition (PE), our free Visual Studio IDE for developing Flex, AIR and ActionScript applications, so we thought you might like an idea of the principal differences between Amethyst PE and Amethyst Professional (the commercial IDE which we will launch later in the year).
Amethyst Personal Edition
It’s FREE - yes, really, really free. That’s not just the beta. When we release version 1.0, it will still be free.
If you haven’t got a commercial copy of Visual Studio, you can even install it into a free copy of the Visual Studio 2008 ‘Shell’ edition which is, of course, FREE!
It has IntelliSense/code completion
It has integrated debugging with breakpoints, drilldown, step-into etc.
It has ActionScript and MXML code coloring (with over 70 color options!)
It has user-configurable automatic code formatting
It supports Flex/AIR and ActionScript (e.g. for Flash) projects
It supports a broad range of Visual Studio tools including the Object Browser, Solution Explorer, multi-pane editing etc.
Amethyst Professional
Amethyst Professional a commercial product (price to be announced) which has all the features of Amethyst PE plus:
A drag-and-drop Visual Designer for both Flex and AIR
Round-tripping between designer and code
Auto-expanding code snippets and a dedicated snippet editor
ActionScript refactoring
Significantly enhanced debugging and IntelliSense
The current beta (beta 4) now has all the essential features of Amethyst PE plus a few (such as snippets) Professional features. Beta 5 will add in refactoring. And the Amethyst designer will be added after that. If you want to try out the current beta go to the Download Page.
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Cant wait for this to be released...
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Bear in mind that the current beta will last for several months before it expires and we’ll have other betas before that happens. You will be able to keep on using the latest betas until the final product is released.
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Sounds great. If it’s stable and priced sanely (ie, around Flex Builders price) then you will probably get at least one sale from us.
Mind you, if Adobe had done or ever does a better job with Eclipse integration, then there would be little reason to move.