Today we are excited to introduce Android Studio 1.0. Android Studio is the official Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from the Android team. It is built on the popular IntelliJ IDEA (Community Edition) Java IDE.
What a coincidence (*).
Today we are excited to introduce Android Studio 1.0. Android Studio is the official Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from the Android team. It is built on the popular IntelliJ IDEA (Community Edition) Java IDE.
What a coincidence (*).
Anybody knows whats the difference to the IDEA is? I’m using stock IDEA (community edition) for Android development all the time and Android is supported perfectly. So why Android Studio?
The previous official IDE was eclipse, which is awful.. Really really awful.
http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2013/05/intellij-idea-and-android-st…
Long story short – if you’re happy with your current IntelliJ IDEA, stick with it.
As a non-developer who’s curious about the goings on in this space, how does this IDE compared to the others out there? Is it just like a beginner/hobbyist IDE like the Visual Studio starter edition (or whatever it’s called), or can you do professional/serious work with it?
Also, has anyone ever tried Basic4Android?
http://basic4ppc.com
Edited 2014-12-08 21:49 UTC
No, it’s a full-featured IDE. I do Android dev professionally using it (and have for the last 6 months or so. So much nicer since switching from Eclipse)
New Visual Studio free editions are rather full featured. Equivalent to VS Pro. For commercial/non commercial use too, except in the enterprise.
The Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition is basically identical tot he version I have currently open here at work. Only the license conditions and slight branding changes really make is different.
The older express editions are pretty basic, single language/area and kind of okay but not well suited for real dev work.
Oh my, it’s as far from it – in the good direction – as you could imagine. I won’t bash Eclipse, since there are very very many people satisfied with it, but AS has become really very good. Regarding Basic4android, it just gives me the creeps every time I remember it exists
)
In my opinion intelliJ (the comercial version) is the best IDE for java developers. Much more nice to work with than Eclipse or Netbeans, very complete and very professional. The community version is ok for simple projects.
With Eclipse you have more plugins, but they are so damn buggy while intellij is very mature and stable.
The Good news: Was ’bout time.
The Bad news: Still no support for the NDK, which is inexcusable. I hate how Google pretends most devs will never need to write native C++ using the NDK, and yet it’s a requirement if you want to have 3D hardware acceleration.
Even if there is some way to do 3D hardware acceleration in Java (is there any btw?), you still need to use native code for performance (aka to not incur Dalvik overheads, and no most people won’t get Lollipop antyime soon).
This is why iOS has more quality games than Android. Android has a “gap”, where if you want to have 3D hardware acceleration, you have to move from the SDK to the NDK. iOS allows devs to built on the knowledge they have acquired while building 2D apps.
Edited 2014-12-09 16:52 UTC
3d acceleration? is the GL view not accelerated!? for some tasked you could also use RenderScript, its expensive to copy large data from RenderScript <-> java though…
Although you incur into extra copies (Java arrays to ByteBuffers) OpenGL is pretty fast in Java, after all most of the work is done in GLSL.
Now in relation to the NDK I fully agree. It is the most painful experience from all mobile OSes.
I would bet that the NDK was forced upon the Android team by upper management and if it was their choice it wouldn’t ever existed.
All the screenshots are from OS X. Ever since Google “phased-out” Windows in the company, it seems that OS X has become the desktop OS of choice for Googlers. Not Ubuntu or Mint or some other Linux Desktop.
Tim Cook probably is proud for this.
Edited 2014-12-09 16:53 UTC
I really like Eclipse, and think that it currently is the best multi language ide, and I have newer had any performance problems with it*.
I really hope that Google will continue, to support eclipse, as a secondary ide.
*All reports of performance problems for eclipse I have seen have come from mac. Might be a problem with Macs OS X, or the swt implementation for Mac OS X. Eclipse runs really well in Linux.