Cloud-based arduino editor and programmer. Now I won’t have to tell people to download 100 MB of development environment, make sure they have all the right libraries installed, and so on and so forth just so they can get an LED to blink. On the other hand, it means they don’t get to use Ardublock until some smart cookie figures out how to port it to a browser (which should be relatively simple, since Ardublock is just a bunch of java code that plays with little chunks of XML and delivers Arduino code to a local editor. So the equivalent in web-based programming should be simple enough. See also Scratch.)

Browser-based development environments are becoming way more common (it’s not just arduino but also Beaglebone Black and Spark Core) which is probably a good thing, because even if you’re a codehead it’s a pain keeping all your tools and libraries and random little bits of useful crap up to date and consistent across multiple machines. And pretty much everyone uses more than one computer. Of course it also means that if some machine on the other side of the world decides to have a sneezing fit you can’t get any work done, but that seems to be becoming standard these days.

The Beaglebone Black case is particularly interesting for me, by the way, because cloud9, the browser-based programming environment you’re using there (if you do) is actually being served by the tiny little computer itself. You could attach a keyboard, mouse and screen to the Beaglebone directly, and then open up a bunch of windows to program it, but it’s just as easy to let the BBB run its web server with a bunch of accessories that let you program in a browser window. It’s as if the browser has become the primary metaphor for everything people do on computers, even programming or something.