Rather than insulting you for committing the mortal HN sin of releasing on Windows, I'm going to say - great job. Looks fantastic and it is great to see how vibrant the Arduino community is these days. Keep up the good work and good luck with your search for contributors.
I've sent the author an email offering help with moving it to a toolkit of some sort that is not so tightly tied to windows. wx or qt or anything that's not windows only.
C++, using VCL [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Component_Library ], unfortunately. A port would largely be a rewrite of the entire GUI bit. The rest is fairly portable, except it assumes some things about how the arduino install is structured.
Disappointing is to see this type of comment in a forum like this. Isn't this supposed to be Hacker News? Quit complaining, get the code, make it work, commit it back to the repo, write about it, and post here. That's the hacker way.
I've developed on Windows and for Windows for quite some time and I can tell you while it's not hard to make *nix code work on Windows, it can be devilishly complicated to make Windows code portable to anything else. Usually, the best strategy is to keep a very clear separation between core functionality and user interface code and forget about making the UI portable unless you use absolutely nothing Windows-specific.
It's almost as if it's done on purpose. Microsoft gains very little from making code written originally for Windows portable to other platforms and a lot from making it next to impossible to port your code away from Windows once you get it running on it.
After attempting to use the Eclipse plugin tonight, failing, and reverting back to the Arduino IDE, I too would be interested in this making it to Linux.
