I tried Amtel Studio 7 which is a very good alternative to the basic Arduino IDE, and offers a lot of extra tools.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I too made the switch because you can get up and running on the arduino platform very quickly and have something running using existing examples and library files. Once you have those examples running, it's normally an east task to modify the example to use it to perform the functions your want. As mentioned I wanted to use a TFT screen for the next version of my thermostat project that originated back in 2009 and was based on an 16F877 and 4 x 20 LCD (and I couldn't have done that without DT and Hentiks help). It would have been a lot of hard work and beyond my expertise to write the code in PB or ASM in order to get it to work, yet on the arduino it was displaying text in around 20 minutes of hooking the screen up and loading the example code. I then played with the commands to make the screen more relevant to the project, and then added an example code for reading an 18B20 sensor and displaying the temperature on the screen... by the end of the evening I had the time and temperature displayed on the screen along with a few additional variables... It makes it so easy to develop projects, but as mentioned, it's base around using these boards (uno, nano, mega etc) at the heart and stacking plug in modules (shields) into them. Where as programming PICs often results in a single custom designed PCB that the PIC plugs into.

It's really a shame that PBP didn't keep up with the pace and support more upto date hardware with standalone include files....