We've now made a major compiler and website update available for beta trials. The highlight of this update is support for developing and publishing your own libraries. Here are the details, along with the other features and updates we've added...

Library Publishing

Up until now, you could publish programs straight from the compiler to the mbed website. While this could be abused to share code usable as libraries, we've now taken this idea and built in a proper workflow to support native development and publishing of libraries. This should provide a great way to create and share reusable library components to drive peripherals etc, and help us all stop repeating ourselves and ultimately build our prototypes even faster!

When you've put together some ninja code, we want to make it easy for you to share your effort in a way that makes it easy for others to reuse. Plus, fold in fixes, improvements and documentation. To do this, you can now create a new library that is editable within the compiler. In the example below, a "Flasher" library has been created and is in active development:

Once you are happy, you can right click the library and publish it with descriptions and tags; it'll get posted to a new "libraries" section of your user account on the mbed website, and be converted to a proper published library within your program:

As this is now published, anyone can go to it on the website, and import it in to their programs by clicking on the link:

It is possible to edit the library and republish it, enabling a simple way to provide updates to libraries and allow them to improve and bugfix over time, taking advantage of the integrated one-click updates that have been supported by the mbed libraries, for any library.

And if you document your library with doxygen markup, you'll also get your documentation generated for you to make it even easier for users to make use of your hard work:

Have a play on beta and please tell us how you get on. For more details on libraries, see the full writeup in the cookbook:

• Writing a Library

Other Updates

A collection of other things have made it in:

The IDE now lets you manage your workspace, allowing you to easily search and select which projects are active in your workspace:

We've updated the underlying compiler engine:

• Moved to the new RVDS 4.1 compiler engine
• Added proper support for C as well as C++; you can now officially create and compile .c files!

The compiler IDE has had a load of minor improvements and fixes, including fixing the Mac copy/paste bugs that had been hanging around.

Finally, you can now add your geographic location and twitter/linkedin details to your profile:

I'm incredibly proud at how helpful, polite and supportive everyone who has gotten involved in our little community has been so far, and I'd really like to keep it that way. I'd really encourage you to upload a photo, set your location, and add a few words of who you are on your profile, as i'm convinced that will help as a reminder that we're all real people, and encourage the same respect as if you met in person; please help us keep mbed personal and supportive!

To test the beta mode, just use the floating betamode box on the front page, and tell us of any problems in the forum. Hope you enjoy the updates!