Some weeks ago I bought a "Ready for PIC" board from MikroElektronika. These board comes with a PIC18F25K22 flashed with a bootloader that receives a program from UART and load it in memory without flashing. The prototype area is very nice for peoples that do not want to weld, it also contains a FTDI chip and can be powered by USB. Plus MikroElektronika supply a GUI software to interact with the bootloader. These GUI is available for Windows and Linux, that's great ! Contrary to microchip, MikroElektronika wants to sell their expensive C/BASIC/Pascal compiler and provide cool boards at a good price. The only thing I regret is that you cannot reset the PIC with the FTDI, you need to press the reset button before and after code is downloaded (so boring...).

Maybe the GUI is useful for electronics peoples, but I found it (on Linux) heavy and sometimes buggy. Moreover you cannot access to serial output just after code is downloaded. So, I wrote a simple console Python program that will download an HEX file with command line and optionally displays the output of UART. This allows to do quicker and simpler tests. You can find the file here, it's licensed under GPL v3.