After almost two years in development the new Arduino IDE, version 1.6.0, was released yesterday. The latest version of the Arduino development environment comes with a long laundry list of new features.

Support for multiple platforms

Boards are detected and listed on “Port” 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

Find/replace over multiple tabs

Improved lots of Arduino API libraries (String, Serial, Print, etc.)

Tools & toolchains upgrades (avr-gcc, arm-gcc, avrdude, bossac, etc.)

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”

Better support to 3rd party hardware vendors with configuration files

Submenus with board configuration can now be defined

Fix for upload problems on Leonardo, Micro and Yún.

Libraries bundled with Arduino have been improved

A lot of minor bugs of the user interface have been fixed

But despite all the important fixes sometimes it’s the small changes that make the biggest difference.

“The major pieces, like multi-platform support, the re-structured pre-proprocessor, and the serial improvements are great. But I think the little things will make more of a difference every day; the Add Library addition in the ‘Sketch’ menu, the option for line numbering, some improvements in the error messages…” — Tom Igoe, Arduino Team

For my own part — as someone that often times works with more than one Arduino attached to his computer at a time — the thing I’m most excited about? The fact that the new IDE will auto-detect the type of board connected and list it next to the associated serial port in the ‘Port’ menu.

“One thing I’m pleased with about this release is how many of the improvements came from the community. The developers’ list has felt pretty productive of late. Cristian Maglie and Federico Fissore, our lead developers, have been making an effort to be more responsive to the developers’ list feedback and the patches that have been submitted.” — Tom Igoe, Arduino Team

The new release is available to download right now, and remember to report any issues either on Github, or on the Arduino forums, because the team is already working on 1.6.1.