DAN GALPIN: I'm Dan Galpin, Android Developer Advocate
here at Google.
This is Android Tool Time, and we're here
with Android Studio 2.2.
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At Google I/O this year, we previewed Android Studio 2.2,
promising a host of new features and improvements.
After testing and integrating your feedback
during the preview and beta phases,
we're happy to announce that Android Studio 2.2 is now
available for download in the stable channel.
Android Studio 2.2 offers improvements
for all phases of app creation-- prototyping and interface
design, code development and iteration, and testing
and debugging.
Let me walk you through some of those changes.
We revamped the Layout Editor and added built-in support
for constraint layout, an entirely new way
to build dynamic user interfaces on Android in a visual way
by specifying view positions and constraints.
The Layout Editor features a new blueprint mode and an attribute
panel for changing the visual attributes of widgets
so you won't have to jump into text mode as often.
And for when you need to debug your UI,
we have a new layout inspector that
lets you capture a snapshot of the hierarchy and attributes
as they run on a device or emulator.
We're continually improving the Code Editor,
bringing you better code analysis with new
and updated lint checks.
You can now also simply right click
to search across all our samples on GitHub
when you need to consult Android sample code
for the proper usage of an API.
And we've upgraded to IntelliJ 2016.1
with all its enhancements, such as right
to left language support and method argument reordering.
Thanks to the Firebase integration,
you can now easily add Firebase services, like analytics,
Cloud Messaging, and crash reporting to your apps,
including initial project setup and adding dependencies.
We include handy documentation links and code snippets
that you can add to your app to get the Firebase features up
and running quickly.
To better understand what happens
to your manifest during merging, you can now
use the Merged Manifest Viewer.
This lets you preview the manifest
as it will look after the build with contributions
from other manifest files in libraries highlighted
in different colors.
For developers who want to examine the finished
content of their APK, we've built a new APK
analyzer in Android Studio.
By simply opening your app's APK,
you will be able to inspect how much space each component
of your app takes up along with an estimated download size,
even taking into account any compression applied by the Play
Store.
With the compare feature, it's easy to analyze
APK size regressions relative to previous versions of your app.
You can also debug Multidex issues
by drilling down into classes.dex
as well as explore the contents of resource files.
Anyone working with native code in libraries will be happy
to hear that we've added support for C and C++ projects using
the CMake and NDK build systems.
Now you can seamlessly import your native project in Android
Studio and take advantage of the many improvements we've made
to editing and debugging C and C++ code in the IDE.
For those working with OpenGLES directly,
we're including a beta version of a new GPU debugger which
records GL commands at runtime and lets you replay and fully
inspect the GL state in each frame
and after each instruction, including
the contents of the buffers, textures, and meshes.
We're still working on a few features for the GPU debugger,
as well as improvements to its speed and stability, which
is why it's marked as beta.
Please give us feedback on this new tool through the Android
Studio Google+ community in Bug Tracker.
With this release of Android Studio,
we're letting developers try out our new tool for creating
UI tests for your apps-- the Espresso Test
Recorder, also in Beta.
The Test Recorder works by recording your interactions
with the app within the emulator and letting you add assertions
in a simple interface.
The generated tests are just plain Java code
using the Espresso library, so you can customize them
later if needed.
The release of Android Studio 2.2
coincides with the 25.2.2 updates
to the SDK Tools and Android emulator.
The emulator now lets you simulate several Android
sensors, such as the accelerometer, magnetometer,
ambient temperature, and more within the emulator UI,
including a 3D representation of the device
that you can move about.
As always, the newest Android Studio
brings many other under-the-hod improvements,
such as fixes to Instant Run, build time improvements,
support for annotation processors in the Jack
compiler, new app packaging code, and better accessibility
supporting the IDE.
To make sure you get the most of this version of Studio,
remember to update your projects to use the 2.2.0 version
of our Android Gradle plugin.
Update your build tools and emulator
images using the SDK Manager, and make
sure to enable Instant Run.
I think that you'll enjoy the many new features and stability
improvements in Android Studio 2.2.
And as always, we're looking forward to your feedback.
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