Go To Amethyst Announcement

We’ll be releasing the first public beta of Amethyst Personal next week. This is free now and will remain free after the launch of the final product. If you haven’t got a copy of Visual Studio, you can even use our All-In-One installer to install a free copy of the Visual Studio ‘Shell’ edition.

The first beta of Amethyst Personal provides syntax coloured editing and code collapsing for ActionScript and MXML. It has project management in the Visual Studio Solution Explorer and it will compile and launch Flex and AIR applications.

You can use Amethyst on its own, or you can create mixed language Solutions with Amethyst projects alongside C#, VB or Ruby In Steel projects. You could even install a free copy of Ruby In Steel Personal Edition to give you a free IDE for developing Ruby On Rails applications with Flex front ends!

Early next year, we will launch Amethyst Professional. This will have a visual design environment with a user interface designer that will allow you to drag controls from the Visual Studio Toolbox onto the design workspace, line them up using alignment guides, set properties in the Properties panel and click events to go directly into the code editor - just as you would in C#!

As in our professional Ruby IDE, Amethyst Professional will have full IntelliSense, drill-down debugging and sophisticated editing. All of the above features are already in the alpha stage of development and I’ll be demoing the visual designer, IntelliSense and more on the SapphireSteel blog soon.

In the meantime, look back on the SapphireSteel site in the second week of December to grab a beta of Amethyst Personal.