The new Android Studio based on the Community Edition of IntelliJ was released yesterday at Google IO. This replaces the ADT Bundle based on Eclipse released last year. It bring a new set of features and tools to make it easier to develop great Android apps. This video provides a walk through of the new features:
Key features include:
- A ‘live layout’ which renders your app as you’re editing in real-time
- Displaying different layouts and screen sizes such and phone and tablets side-by-side so you can quickly see what things look like without having to package up your app and viewing it on the emulator or device.
- Better code completion.
- Preview of assets such as icons within the IDE.
Android Studio is still in beta so expect issues when installing or using it. I had issues running it on both my Windows 7 and Windows 8 computers. This was solved by setting the path for Java. A guide for setting the path can be found at http://java.com/en/download/help/path.xml
The first time I tried to create a project I got an error saying that SDK 22 wasn’t found. I’m sure this will be resolved for the 0.2 release. The workaround I found was to open a Android project I’d already created using IntelliJ. If you’re coming from Eclipse then you can migrate your Eclipse projects if you have the updated ADT Plugin. I already had the Android SDK installed in a folder so I updated it to SDK 22 then went into File > Project Structure > Platform Settings > SDKs and changed the settings to point at my folder with SDK 22.
The Next Web have provided a guide to everything announced at the Google I/O 2013 keynote in one handy list.