I'm happy to announce that there is now a pre-release version of the new MetaEdit+ 4.5 available. You can go to the normal download form and request the Windows version (sorry, others will follow after the full Windows release), and on the actual download page after that, follow the link to the pre-release page.

The pre-release page has links to the release notes, and of course the download includes the manuals that explain the new features. As a brief overview, here's a picture and a list of some of the highlights. I've enlarged one symbol from the picture so you can see what you can do with MetaEdit+'s Symbol Editor and the new fountain fills -- that's all scalable vector graphics, no bitmaps or other trickery.

• Generators
• Generators are now compiled not interpreted
• Extension of old generator syntax, so old generators still valid
• Generator debugger
• Variables, maths operations, protected blocks, output representation info
• Loops can specify own rules for sorting and filtering out duplicates
• If conditions can use more comparison and boolean operators
• Can specify character mappings to translate sections of output, e.g. replace space with underline
• Live code: generator output has hyperlinks back to corresponding model elements
• Metamodeling
• Optional graphical metamodeling, use any metamodeling language you like
• Added Uniqueness Constraint for uniqueness of given property in given object type in graphs.
• Added Occurrence Constraint for number of occurrences of given object type in graph.
• List properties can get the list contents from an external tool via SOAP
• New 'Creation Timestamp' property datatype
• Can mark types abstract by prefixing with _
• Symbol Editor
• Multi-level undo
• Fountain fills
• Conditions can be based on generator output and regular expressions
• XML
• Import/export of models to XML now includes diagram, matrix and table representations
• Import/export of metamodels to XML
• Can use for graphical metamodeling: output XML with generator
• Symbols imported/exported as SVG
• Diagram Editor
• Sidebar with tree view of all objects, and property sheet for selected element
• Autolayout can be based on tree structure, with diagonal or Manhattan routing
• Text Editor widgets have multi-level undo, Ctrl+B = bold etc.
• New Startup Launcher allows users to login with a minimum of UI actions and dialogs.
• Graph creation uses new combined dialog rather than series of dialogs
• Patch and XML file extensions changed: .pat->.me*, .gxl->.mx*
• Japanese support (shortly available for download)
• Show type symbol in lists of metamodel and model elements