After nearly two years in development Arduino has announced version 1.6.0 of their IDE. Many of the new features are in response to user feedback. Key features of version 1.6.0 include:

  • Support for multiple platforms
  • Boards are detected and listed on “ports list” menu together with the serial port
  • Drivers and IDE are now signed for Windows and MacOSX
  • Improved speed of build process
  • Autosave when compiling/uploading sketch
  • A lot of improvements of the serial monitor (faster, backed by modern JSSC serial library instead of old RXTX)
  • Find/replace over multiple tabs
  • Improved lots of Arduino API libraries (String, Serial, Print, etc.)
  • Tools & toolchains upgrades (avr-gcc, arm-gcc, avrdude, bossac)
  • Command line interface
  • IDE reports both sketch size and static RAM usage
  • Editor shows line numbers
  • Scrollable menus when many entries are listed
  • Upload via network (Yún)
  • HardwareSerial has been improved
  • USB has got some stability and performance improvements
  • SPI library now supports “transactions” for better interoperability when using multiple SPI devices at the same time
  • Better support to 3rd party hardware vendors with configuration files (platform.txt and boards.txt)
  • Submenus with board configuration can now be defined
  • Fix for upload problems on Leonardo, Micro and Yún.
  • Libraries bundled with Arduino have been improved and bugfixed, in particular: Bridge, TFT, Ethernet, Robot_Control, SoftwareSerial, GSM
  • A lot of minor bugs of the user interface have been fixed

The team are always keen to receive feedback on any issue, use either Github or the Arduino forum. Work on Version 1.6.1 is already underway; expect announcements in the coming weeks.