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Google Releases Android Studio 1.0, the First Stable Version of Its IDE
An anonymous reader writes After two years of development, Google today released Android Studio 1.0, the first stable version of its Integrated Development Environment (IDE) aimed solely at Android developers. You can download the tool right now for Windows, Mac, and Linux from the Android Developer site. Google first announced Android Studio, built on the popular IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE, at its I/O Developer conference in May 2013. The company's pitch was very simple: this is the official Android IDE.
From what I've read, it looks like a decent IDE, comparable with similar items (Eclipse, for example.) The fact that it allows one to display text and other items and see how it will look on a number of devices at once is a nice touch.
The proof will be in the pudding -- I wonder how usable it will be as a day to day tool for app developers and coding houses, especially with multiple people doing check-ins and such.
For those that don't know, Android Studio is JetBrains' Intellij product re-packaged to promote Android. If you like Intellij, there you go. It's a much, much better experience than Eclipse / ADT.
It still won't update from a 0.9 to a 1.0 version with a regular patch, prepare for all kinds of sorrow while you try to upgrade. Dependencies, good luck. Back up everything you have, twice, before you attempt updating through the SDK Manager.
Gradle also hit 1.0, what a coincidence. If you get it upgraded correctly in-line without having to delete the entire IDE and start over, Gradle now takes longer and not less time to do builds.
In addition, Gradle's upgrade will break your unit tests. Suddenly you get new errors like "The current Gradle build type does not support this test." Now that you have Android Studio updated, finally, you have to rip out Gradle and reinstall it by hand to fix this.
Google suddenly closed 11,000 bugs all at once, claiming they're all fixed and obsolete. 11,000 bugs, just solved overnight! Yeah Fucking Right.
Your best bet is to back up your entire environment, wipe the PC, reinstall the operating system, reinstall Android Studio from the ground up, and then import your projects back in. Make sure to sacrifice a few chickens in your backyard and pray to Sergei to make everything work.
I wish I'd never touched this platform, the developer tools are a constantly evolving state of CLUSTERFUCK.
The two solve completely different problems?
Make is horrible anyway, the syntax is just bad. But ignoring that- make, bash, perl, or python build scripts solve the problem of building code. That's not what an IDE does (in fact it generally just calls a build script when it does do it). An IDE is a graphical editor with built in features useful for editing code and a tightly linked debugging environment. THe build stuff is a minor component of one. Even most people who do use home rolled scripts to build use an IDE to edit.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Has anyone been using this for Scala development with the android-sdk-plugin? I've been working on my first Scala android app and see it as a big improvement over Java. The only negative is that I've been using sbt+emacs instead of the blessed android dev environment (which used to be Eclipse) so I've been missing some features.
Stable fast mature IDE, check. Git integration, check. Closest thing to usable multi platform, check. Efficiency of c# (in getting work done), check. Minimum of screwing around before you can get to work, check.
In its favour the Android integration is far better - obviously. Android Studio provides all of the tools out of the box to build an Android app from end to end which includes all the packaging and signing at the end. In Eclipse you can can develop and debug easily enough but if you want an apk you have to manually invoke a dialog to package and sign APK. This is a huge pain.
Note that AS doesn't actually build anything. Everything is farmed out to a gradle script. This means you can build from AS, or the command line or even from Jenkins from the same script. This is very useful and you can your own custom tasks, unit tests and other goodness to your scripts. But... gradle is goddamned slow. As in REALLY slow. Even if you configure it spawn a daemon so it doesn't respawn all the time (yes I've done that) it's still slow. The problem is if you change a Java class it still has to run through every task checking the dependencies to see what needs to be built and it takes too damned long.
Eclipse is extremely good at incremental building so you can make a change and hit run and in seconds you're debugging. Eclipse is also superior for marking code in error - AS only tends to know about errors local to the file, e.g. syntax errors. If you call a method in another class and get the params wrong you might only be told when gradle reports an error. In Eclipse it would have told you instantly which means turnaround is so much faster. I also prefer the Java editor in Eclipse, because it knows more about your project as a whole, the code completion and hints are more immediate and useful. I'm also used to the keybindings but AS has some Eclipse keybindings so that doesn't matter too much.
Android Studio does have some excellent code analysis tools. It has Android lint integrated into the build and there are a pile of things it can search for in addition to that and in many cases will offer automatic solutions. It also has nicely integrated view and fragment editors which work better than the ones in Eclipse.
AS is a terrible CPU hog. I've noticed it eating anywhere between 5-30% of the CPU depending on what panes are open. This is a serious problem on a laptop because the fan starts whirring and the battery life suffers. The command prompt pane is the worst of all and I only assume it's killing the CPU by continuously polling. Source code integration is also inferior to Eclipse - EGit is a wonderfully mature plugin these days with some complex and useful functionality - the support for Git in AS seems quite perfunctory by comparison although it covers the basics.
So to summarise pros for AS:
And the cons:
He's never met one. He uses vim.