After almost two years in development the new Arduino IDE, version 1.6.0, has been released.

When we reported Arduino IDE 1.0.5 Released, back in May 2013 we said it was expected to be the last in the  version 1 series and that as Version 1.5 has already been in beta for a while it was expected to become the standard IDE within a short period of time.

In fact there was another release in the existing series. 1.0.6 was issued in September 2014, and given that the 1.5.x series had reached Version 1.5.8 in beta the new stable version has been released as 1.6.

The Arduino development environment is used by millions of people around the world, not only for Arduino boards and shields but also for the Intel Galileo and Edison so having an updated stable version comes as welcome news.

Not surprisingly, given the length of time in development, the list of new features given in the Arduino blog announcement is long: 

• 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

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