WOJTEK KALICINSKI: Hi, my name is Wojtek Kalicinski,
and this is Android Tool Time, with What's
New in Android Studio 2.3.
After the feature-packed release that was 2.2,
we are starting the new year with Android Studio 2.3, which
offers many refinements and fixes to existing components,
as well as some exciting new features.
The first thing I'd like to mention
is the overhaul of the Instant Run UI.
We followed advice from developers,
and now provide two buttons--
Run, which you will use to deploy and start
your app, and Apply Changes, for any subsequent code
and resource modifications.
This uses Instant Run to quickly update the running app using
cold, warm, or hot swap, and now requires a device or emulator
running Lollipop and above.
In case you happen to see any unexpected problems,
you can always use the Run button again
to force a full app restart.
Speaking about speeding up build times,
in Android Gradle plug-in 2.3, we've
now enabled the build cache by default.
The build cache is a shared directory on your machine
where libraries are extracted and compiled
to be used across all projects, making both incremental
and full builds faster.
We've also made some general performance improvements
in product sync and the Gradle integration
in this version of Android Studio,
and moved to Gradle version 3.3.
The ID itself brings the new features of the IntelliJ 2016.2
release, such as the new Inspections Tool
window, overhauled notifications, breadcrumbs
in the Java editor, and more.
The Layout Editor received some updates too.
In the Palette window, we now show
widget previews and support sorting and filtering by name.
The property inspector, here on the right,
now lets you add the most-used properties
to your favorites for quick access on the Overview page.
And finally, the visual editor has a new set
of controls and refined visuals for constraint layout editing,
including new icons, an easier way
of adding baseline handles, and support for two big features
of the constraint layout--
chains and ratios.
By the way, constraint layout is now
the default when creating new projects with Android Studio
templates.
Moving on, the vector drawable import dialog
received a small but highly requested upgrade.
You can now search the material icons catalog
by name, which makes it a lot easier
to locate the one you need.
For raster images, we've added WebP support in the ID.
WebP is an image compression format developed at Google
that can replace both JPEG and PNG images with smaller file
sizes and similar quality.
You can now convert images to WebP straight from the IDE
by right-clicking on a file or folder
and selecting Convert to WebP.
Since WebP support varies across Android versions,
we've also added Lint checks that
look at the content of your images
and will warn you if they're not compatible with the min SDK
version in your project.
Next up, we have the app links assistant.
It guides you through the process
of adding app links support to your app, which includes
creating intent filters for URLs,
modifying activity code to handle those intents,
and generating a digital asset links file for your website.
For fans of Lint, we have some new and updated Lint checks.
We now support additional annotations
such as restrict to and visible for testing,
and the Lint report HTML file now
has a material design look with syntax highlighting.
The biggest addition, however, is Lint baseline support,
which lets you save the current set of known Lint errors
and ignore them for future builds.
This gives you a way of progressively dealing
with technical debt in your project
while still having the benefit of being informed
about any new warnings and errors
that you might introduce.
In the SDK Tools, we've recently added a command line interface
for the SDK manager called SDK Manager.
You can use it to automate installing or updating
SDK components, for example, in scripts or on your CI server.
And lastly, the Espresso Test Recorder
from previous Android Studio versions
gained a few improvements and is now considered stable.
So you can use it for adding Espresso UI
tests to your applications.
Follow our account on Twitter if you have any questions
about the new version, and for the latest Android Studio
news and tips.
Thanks for watching, and for more Android Studio videos,
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