Here are a few of the new features in the forthcoming beta:
Improvements to the Amethyst Designer
Our visual design environment allows you to drag and drop components from the Visual Studio Toolbox right into an integrated Flex design workspace. Here you can move and resize controls and use interactive alignment bars or a configurable grid to snap controls at precisely defined locations.
More Components
The last beta (the first of the Designer) supported a small subset of ‘simple’ controls such as buttons, canvases and panels. The new beta adds support for a larger range of components including complex controls such as Grid, DataGrid and Navigators.
Property Editors
You can now use Visual Studio-style property editors to manipulate the contents of complex controls. For example, to add Rows to a Grid, select ‘(Grid)’ in the Properties panel. Once you’ve added rows, select a specific row in the Grid Rows editor and click ‘Edit’ to add Grid Items in the Grid Items Editor.
Similarly, you can add, delete or reorder the ‘columns’ in a DataGrid or the ‘pages’ (Containers) or a navigator such as an Accordion and use a colour selector to choose colours for a Color Picker.
Interactive Designer Options
As in previous betas, you can set a variety of global options to customize the appearance and behaviour of the Designer using Tools/Options/Amethyst Designer. Now you can also set Grid options interactively to override the defaults. From the Amethyst Designer toolbar, you may select grid sizes, turn the grid one or off and toggle ‘snap to grid’.
New ‘Cylon’ Debugger
Building on our experience in creating the super-fast ‘Cylon’ debugger for the Ruby programming language, SapphireSteel Software is now developing a new debugger for Amethyst. Amethyst Cylon does not use Adobe’s FDB debugger (though Amethyst will continue to support FDB as an option). The new beta will include the first public release of Amethyst Cylon, which fully integrates with Visual Studio to supply categorized ‘drill down’ debugging in the usual debug windows and in the code editor. In the next beta we will release a significantly enhanced version of Amethyst Cylon to provide features available in no other ActionScript debugger and we shall announce details of those features later.
Other Features
The new release of Amethyst will have improved building capabilities. You can now add Project References in the Solution Explorer (as in C#) to specify build dependencies and improve code navigation across projects. The new beta also uses relative paths on building which makes it easier to share code with other users. In addition to the above we have made numerous minor improvements and fixed bugs reported to us by users.
The forthcoming beta of Amethyst will be released in the first week of December.
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