This release introduces major enhancements and new features:
- Large performance and stability improvements
- PySide support (PyQt is no longer exclusively required)
- PyQt API v1 and v2 support
- New profiler plugin (thanks to Santiago Jaramillo, a new contributor)
- Experimental support for IPython v0.11+
- And many other changes
We [the Spyder development team] are all very excited by this new release: Spyder is now becoming the [GUI-based] scientific development environment. Its future seems very promising. First there is the PySide support and the PyQt API v1/v2 support which were strategically essential (this will also help us supporting Python 3 in time). Second there is a cleaner and optimized code: this was critical for Spyder's behavior to be the closest possible to a standard Python interpreter. Third there is a very stable application: a lot of crashes and segmentation faults were fixed during the last year. Last, but not least, the future looks bright thanks to the new project members: we are now 5 committers and 6 contributors.
Stand-alone executable on Windows platforms
Note that, on Windows platforms, Spyder is also available as a stand-alone executable (don't forget to disable UAC on Vista/7). This all-in-one portable version is still experimental (for example, it does not embed sphinx -- meaning no rich text mode for the object inspector) but it should provide a working version of Spyder for Windows platforms without having to install anything else (except Python 2.x itself, of course).
Help needed
More than ever, we welcome any contribution that helps making Spyder an efficient scientific development/computing environment. Join us to help creating your favourite environment!
