The Simulator development is still going. Adding the Unit Testing feature over a year ago (found under Tools > Unit Testing) was the single best step for the Simulator. Previously manual testing would take a few hours and the chance of missing an error was high. Now the Unit Testing takes around 3 minutes typically and is easily done prior to a release. Even better is the latest feature which is that the testing runs up to 5 times faster if the main screen is hidden so the Sketch update and Variable update events do not need to fire. This means testing takes around 1 minute.
In other news, the push to make the Simulator cross platform has bogged down due to the complexity of the cross platform interface. Simple functions such as changing the font in Windows become almost impossible in a cross platform environment. Anyway, the team here will keep going and maybe one day a breakthrough will be made.
With the original Arduino team, the team of 5 has now split into a team of 4 and another team of 1. The team of 4 is still at arduino.cc and the other team is at arduino.org. At this stage, it appears the arduino.org is a business focussed on maximizing profit and damage to the original arduino team but it will be interesting watching this play out.
With the Arduino hardware, the Uno is still the preferred platform due to its simplicity and low cost. There are many new Arduino kits which could be added to the Simulator but at this stage, these will be done on request only.
Below is the text of an email sent out to all users, Pro, expired Pro users and free users.
Webhelp http://virtronics.com.au/help/
What's new
Version 0.99G - June 2015
1. add more graphics to simulate UTFT
2. save file to right place
3. fixup sin((a)+b)*6
4. add toCharArray
5. fixup column sizing - default is now Col Sizing not Dock
6. add minimize Column Widths to Variables right click
7. allow return with
8. allow tabs
9. breakpoints not cleared now on reset - only on load new file
10. colours improved
11. fixup Serial Monitor output - now echoes Serial.print with ASCIITable.ino
12. Serial.Available now correct and also \xab
13. Sleep mode added
14. the line while (expr) ; will now work
15. Improve Syntax colours
