The ice40 design software is relabeled siliconblue stuff as I recall.
I use Altera parts because Quartus is IMO the best thing around and so long as you avoid the .0 versions it doesnt give me much grief.
Whenever I've looked at Altera, they've been lacking in anything competitive with Xilinx or Lattice at the lowest end, and this is compounded by not being able to use cheap SPI flash devices for configuration.
Just did a quick search on Digikey & didn't see anything new in either respect.
My FPGA jobs tend to 'only just ' need an FPGA, usually with a small amount of RAM.
Compared to Xilinx XC3S50A, which appears to be their cheapest part, The ICE40 looks good, but the QFP100 has no PLL, which is probably a killer for this project - I only need maybe 40 pins, and want to keep it small, but not use BGA as it needs to be a 2 layer PCB.
I used Lattice EC3 a while ago as it appeared cheaper than Xilinx, but after getting some 'real' price quotes the difference wasn't that much. Lattice had poorer availability. I found ISPLever subjectively quicker than ISE, but having to renew the free license every 6 months was annoying.
I rarely bother with simulation so quick recompile time is a very major factor, and something with a fast compile would be a significant decider. The Icecube stuff looked fairly quick for the fairly trivial example code - about 25 seconds.
IceCube doesn't seem to be properly integrated either - "Run all Tools" does NOT run the synthesiser, and there seem to be 2 editors - one within the synth and one in the IceCube GUI - bizarre!
As far as I can see there isn't a single key that will do everything from a VHDL file change to generating a bitstream.