Version 2 of SapphireSteel's Flash Platform IDE for Microsoft Visual Studio has been released providing visual design support for Flex, Flash and ActionScript developers.

When Adobe removed the visual designer from Flash Builder 4.7, Flex developers who needed a visual design tool were left stranded. With this new release, Amethyst, has extended its visual design support. It now not only has a drag-and-drop Designer for Flex; it also has a ‘pure Flash’ Designer to support form-based design (with similar capabilities to Windows Forms in C#) for Flash applications that don’t use Flex.

Amethyst 2 builds upon the existing features of Amethyst 1 providing extensive editing and debugging features for Flash and Flex developers who also use Visual Studio 2010 or 2012. The multi-window editor has code collapsing, extensive refactoring, 76 code color options and fast IntelliSense. It can be used to design, debug and deploy applications for the web, the desktop or mobile devices.

New features for ActionScript and Flash developers in Amethyst 2 Ultimate include:

• ‘Bubble-based’ debugger that lets developers step through code in the form of linked call-graphs with each called function shown in a separate popup ‘bubble’.
  
  
• Graphical profiler that analyses the efficiency of a running program and displays a memory map.
  
  
• Developer Scratchpad – a docked panel to store code snippets or even selected methods in popup ‘bubbles’>
  
  
• SWF obfuscator – no need to buy a separate tool to protect your code; Amethyst has one built in.

You can download and install a trial version of Amethyst 2 Ultimate. After the 30-day trial period, Amethyst will automatically degrade to the free Personal Edition, with a restricted feature set unless a license (costing $299) is purchased to unlock the full features.