Would it be possible to extend Spark Dev to support development of regular Arduino devices? I’m asking because the Arduino IDE is pretty lacking and there aren’t many other free options available.
I know this is probably something the Spark team wouldn’t want to take on, but is Spark Dev extendable by the community?
I think this is a great idea! Spark Dev is open source and available on github for forking, so the community could take it in this direction if it wished to.
If you’re looking for a quick fix to getting a better IDE for Arduino development, I can recommend Atmel Studio. I used it for a couple of years when doing Arduino work and it worked well and has some professional features such as exporting a makefile so you can do command line builds/continuous integration.
I am going to try out Visual Micro’s plugin with Visual Studio 2013. If that works, it will be a pretty tough solution to beat. I guess there are more choices for Arduino IDE than I initially thought.
I would switch immediately if it were possible to use Spark Dev with Arduino devices. 
Maybe it’s already there and I haven’t seen the feature but… I would love to have Spark Dev support USB firmware flashing with a command.
That one is in the works! 
We recently added support in the Photon firmware to have an “always on” USB connection so that firmware can be flashed without needing to touch the device!
@frlobo, I guess @mdma refers to a full one-button integration of USB flashing without further ado (e.g. pre-installation of utils or any typing).
But if you’ve already got Spark CLI and DFU-util installed on your machine, it’s just a few clicks and key-presses away.
If you look in the bottom status bar of Spark DEV you’ll see a + with a console symbol. If you click on that a command line pops up where you just enter spark flash --usb and paste in the full path of your last created bin file (which you obtain by right clicking on it in the directory tree) - you just need to put your Core into DFU mode and hit Enter.
If anybody knows of an easier way (e.g. key short cut for spark flash --usb and/or full path of bin file), I’d be grateful
This is great news!
And great tip!
I hope i can see a CMD-R kind of thing for USB flashing soon!
I don’t mind getting the Spark in DFU mode though!
I am on MAC and don’t see the + with a console symbol 
I’m on Windows, so I can’t help you there, but I’d be surprised if there was no equivalent on Mac OS.
Maybe @suda could chime in on this 
Meanwhile you could check in the menu under “Packages - Terminal Status - New”.
I guess there could even be a keyboard shortcut for this - or you can create your own.
This is how it looks on my Spark DEV
Actually someone from Atom’s community got in touch with me, wanting to add Arduino support to Atom. So maybe we’ll see Arduino package soon Spark Dev uses the same package repository as Atom so such package would also work in Dev.
Thanks @suda for the info about the OPs original question! 
But have you also got some tip for @frlobo according terminal support on the Mac version of Spark Dev?
Or some hints about a quicker way to input spark flash --usb <full-path-of-last-built.bin> into the terminal command line?
Thanks for that again, but now I feel left out as a poor ol’ Windows guy 
I was happy with the terminal solution, till I learnt “F6 to flash” on Mac but is not supported on Win (yet).