WOJTEK KALICINSKI: Choosing the right tools for your app
development is more important than ever.
And as the Android platform matured,
so have our needs as developers.
Making great apps is so much easier
when you have a rich and complete dev environment.
And this was the driving decision behind the creation
of Android Studio.
I an Wojtek Kalicinski, and I'm going
to show you why you should be using this powerful new tool.
Android Studio is Google's official IDE
for Android development.
We've combined a robust code editor with an entirely new
build system based on Gradle.
Let's talk about the editor first.
The Getting Started experience is crucial for every app
developer.
So in Android Studio, we focus on making
it easy to create new projects, as well as adding modules
to support Android TV, Android Wear, Glass, and even
the Google Cloud backend.
All you need this to use one of the provided wizards,
and the selected modules will be added
to your project, along with code templates that let you dive
into coding quickly.
For those of you coming from Eclipse,
we've included a tool that lets you import legacy projects.
Not only will it create a new Gradle build configuration
for your app and fix your project structure
behind the scenes, it also identifies
commonly used libraries and brings them in as dependencies,
eliminating the horrible process of moving folders manually
and getting your build to work.
If you just want to check out our samples,
there's now a one-click solution to import them directly
from Google's repository on GitHub
into a ready-to-build and run project.
One of my personal favorites when
working with Android Studio is the new Project View.
It offers a flattened representation of your project
structure, giving quick access to code, resources,
and build files.
In fact, Android Studio will now only list each resource once,
regardless of which configurations
like density or screen size are included in your project.
You can always expand the resource node
and check out all its versions.
When it comes to getting things done and writing code,
Android Studio helps you to stay productive,
while at the same time making sure that you write
clean and error-free code.
Apart from the usual helpers you would
expect from your IDE, like code completion and access
to documentation, we've added powerful new code inspections
and refactorings, targeting performance and compatibility.
You can now easily extract strings into resources,
or even add right to left support to all your layouts
with one click.
To make sure you never again press the wrong resource type
to a method, add one of these annotations to its parameters.
Many of the framework methods are annotated as well,
so Android Studio will show an error
if it encounters, for example, an RGB value where
a color resource is expected.
Android Studio supports your development flow,
which includes working with both Java and XML files.
It's easy to switch between your classes and relevant resources
by clicking this icon, or Control
clicking any part of the resource name in your code.
You even got handy previews of bitmaps
right there in the Editor window.
To get a quick look at what your resource looks
like for different configurations,
or explore theme attributes in the Layout Editor,
use the Quick Documentation View.
You can access it by pressing Control Q or F1,
depending on your settings.
For editing layouts, there is the choice
of using the visual design editor, where
you can drag and drop views on to the Canvas
and manipulate their properties.
Or if you prefer, you can seamlessly
switch to editing XML files directly and see the preview
update in real time.
Android Studio will alert you whenever
you forget to set the required attribute on your views,
such as layout width or height, and can even identify
common performance problems.
If you want to see how your layouts behave
on different screen sizes, or if your translated strings fit
correctly in other locales, you can
switch to multi-preview mode.
This will show your layout simultaneously,
side-by-side on multiple device configurations.
You can even look at how your custom themes and styles behave
across Android versions, which I have to say
is pretty useful when you're targeting older devices.
Oh, and by the way, if you are thinking
of localizing your app, just use the brand new translation
editor that we've created to streamline this task.
As always, our Android tools are being built in the open.
You can follow the progress and get more information
at tools.android.com.
If you haven't already done so, download Android Studio
from the Android developer site.
Also, be sure to follow our Google + page,
and join the Android Tools community
for updates about new features and releases.
Tune into our next video in the Android Studio DevBytes
series, where we'll take a closer look at the new
build system based on Gradle.