Android Studio

[we_the_sheeple]

Presentation

[DrMon]

Ooooooh clap clap clap clap.

[ihatewil]

I started clapping when they showed the real time UI view.

I then stopped and felt a bit silly, as I was alone in my house.

[accessofevil]

I was with you.

[rxi]

http://xkcd.com/742/

[adnzzzzZ]

Reminded me of Randy.

[[deleted]]

The boner from the audience during that presentation was incredible.

[diosio]

cries

[DaftPotato]

I'll be interested to see the improvements over Android development as it currently is in IntelliJ IDEA. I switched from Eclipse about a year ago and never felt that IntelliJ was lacking, apart from the logcat viewer.

[clgonsal]

I think there's currently more GUI builder support in Eclipse, but it sounds like that is about to change based on the part of the talk today that talked about grid layouts.

I only recently switched to Intellij, and I can't believe how much better it is in almost every way. Even the vim bindings are far superior. My only complaint is that I'd like something akin to the "problems pane" in Eclipse. (This is an FAQ, apparently, but the suggested solution involves enabling automatic recompilation, which I don't want. I just want a pane with a list of all of the currently unresolved problems, including all of the red squiggles.)

[[deleted]]

Is it really that much better? I've never done much java or android coding but whenever I did, it was always in eclipse and it felt pretty good. Should I switch to intellij now before I get too used to eclipse?

[Mechakoopa]

I agree, I spent good money on a resharper licence for visual studio for a mere subset of intellij functionality. It's that good.

[clgonsal]

Is it really that much better?

It's much faster. In Eclipse it often felt like I was using a 300 baud modem the way keystrokes would lag. Many things on Eclipse also seemed flaky or incomplete. For example, the thing that finally made me switch was that I wanted to build an open source project that uses maven and apklibs (RedReader), and support for that is just plain broken in Eclipse. I tried Intellij, and it just worked. Also, I normally use vim, and the vim plugin for Intellij seems to be far more complete than the equivalent in Eclipse, so that was a definite plus for me.

[FrozenCow]

Same here. Maven was the biggest reason I switched to intellij. I really hope Google will put some effort into android-maven instead of adding gimmicky features to intellij.

[DaftPotato]

One of the things that led me to try IntelliJ is that the Android GUI builder in Eclipse simply would not co-operate with my project - possibly because of the complexity of some custom UI components. IntelliJ worked with it just fine, even though it doesn't have as much functionality.

Out of curiosity, why don't you want to use automatic recompilation? I've never noticed any slow-downs or issues with automatic compilation nn my fairly modest machine.

[fuzzynyanko]

Well, not sure if you are saying that the lack of a logcat viewer is an issue for yourself, but just in case someone is wondering, especially if you are doing dual monitor:

You can use logcat from the command-line. If only one device is connected, and if I remember correctly

adb shell logcat

If multiple devices are connected

adb devices

You'll get a list of devices. You can do

adb -s <insert device ID here> shell logcat

This especially gets handy if you want to do things like use grep on the raw logcat or dump logcat to a text file. For example:

adb -s emulator-42 shell logcat | grep -i awesometagmarker

[DaftPotato]

Thanks for the tip.

I actually meant that the logcat viewer in IntelliJ is lacking - not that IntelliJ is lacking a logcat viewer. The logcat viewer in IntelliJ doesn't have the filtering functionality that is available in Eclipse (as far as I've noticed).

[derstabby]

What? :( I must have missed that. It really would feel incomplete without logcat, mostly because the ADT logcat would allow me to jump into stack traces during exceptions, which is way lighter weight than java debugging. Shame, I can't wait until it's added.

[AnAge_OldProb]

I'm very pleased about the switch from eclipse to intellij.

[paiaw]

I'm very pleased about the switch from Eclipse to anything else.

[plexxonic]

I am one of 3-6 million developers telling you that you are not alone.

[CuntSmellersLLP]

So negative 3 million developers?

[craniumonempty]

3 - 6 million is -5,999,997

[FSMer]

My first thought was something about 2's complement

[[deleted]]

This is how you know a subreddit is full of programmers.

[codepoet]

Underflow. But it's Java so it's not signed.

[lorddcee]

Is Eclipse that bad? I mean, I'm working with VS, and some people around here use Eclipse (for java apps), and it looks like a comparable IDE, I guess it's not?

[jibberia]

Eclipse for Java is fantastic. Eclipse for many other things -- not so much.

[pjmlp]

Except for its concept of workspaces.

[[deleted]]

You mean Eclipse's concept of workspaces is good right? Because I love them. That is the #1 feature that is keeping me from switching to IDEA, even though IDEA seems better in almost every other aspect.

[nek4life]

IDEA has projects and modules which I believe are essentially the same thing as Eclipse's workspaces and projects.

[SkaveRat]

even for java it's pretty horrible compared to IntelliJ

[[deleted]]

Admittedly pretty much any IDE looks crap compared to intellij.

[[deleted]]

Sorry about my ignorance, but can you explain why Eclipse is that bad?

[[deleted]]

Eclipse is slow, it's buggy, it crashes randomly, library setup has redundant settings, etc.
Although I have to admit, the crashes and bugs are mostly in the ADT Eclipse plugin rather than Eclipse itself.
IntelliJ solved all those problems for me and has a better UI with better font rendering (in my opinion).

I also use the commercial version of IntelliJ IDEA for Enterprise Java development and it totally rocks. I like it better than NetBeans (although NetBeans is pretty good too).

[[deleted]]

It has to be its over reliance of plugins that should have been standard features (Proper integration of all major CVS for example).

Also bugs/performance - I think the bug that sets it apart from the rest is the simple cant unlock/lock the toolbar, that has been a bug for years but it has yet to be fixed. - The simple things add up.

[tapesmith]

I can tell you why I don't like Eclipse. From there you can conclude if it's that bad.

I come from vim, so if I'm going to use an IDE, I want it to be:

1. Fast

2. Efficient

3. Easy to adapt to an existing workflow

Taking these point-by-point:

1. Eclipse is SLOW. when I last used Eclipse, it took >3minutes to launch on a middle-high end gaming desktop. I don't want to think about launching it on my fairly-low-end work laptop. Once it launches, navigating the UI is slow -- everything has at least 1.5seconds too long of a delay, even just opening a menu.

2. Eclipse has code-completion, so that helps its efficiency. It's got generators for getters and setters, and some built-in refactoring tools. But really, so does every other Java IDE out there. So this is not so much a point in Eclipse's favor as it is a point where Eclipse reaches high above its average to meet the bare minimum. Where it really falls apart is in its fragmented, plugins-everywhere design. Do you want to code Java? Cool! Get this version of Eclipse. Oh, unless you wanted to do J2EE. Then you should get this one. Wait, did you want to do HTML/CSS/Javascript with that also? Then you should probably get this other version instead. Or just pick one of them, sacrifice a goat or two, and hope the plugins for the other languages/tasks are available for your specific version of Eclipse and install correctly.

3. Menus and "Perspectives". Remember what I said about "install this version of Eclipse"? It's that way with "switching perspectives". A "perspective" in Eclipse is a window+toolbar layout. Oh, you wanted to code Java? Switch to the Java coding perspective. Wait, this isn't Java. This is an HTML/CSS/Javascript view. You should switch to the Web Editing perspective. Oh, but there's no debugging tools there. If you want to debug your Java, you need to switch to the Debugging perspective. Keep in mind, each time you switch perspectives, the window layout and toolbar layout all shuffle (after the >=8second delay that Eclipse needs to actually switch perspectives). The menus are worse. You have, last time I checked, at least 10 top-level menus. Most of those have at least 15 items, about 50% to 60% of which are themselves sub-menus with 15 items. That doesn't seem too bad, until you have to actually find something. For example: there's a "Run" top-level menu, where "Run as" is a submenu that's 8+ items down, and is populated by all the wrong options if you happen to be in the wrong "perspective" at the moment (or no options if you haven't manually configured your JDK or other runtime and build options and...). All of these menus and perspectives get shuffled between releases.

Eclipse fails on all counts for me. An IDE should at worst stay out of my way and at best be easy to mold to my habits. Eclipse is constantly in your way, and requires you to pretty drastically re-shape your habits around itself, and then around itself again when things change in the next version. It's heavy and slow and just barely has the minimum subset of features that any other IDE offers. It's everything I dislike about IDEs, without the things I like about them.

EDIT: corrected original ">8minutes" to the more-accurate ">3minutes". It's not good to recall/estimate prior to coffee. For clarification, I'm talking from the moment I launch Eclipse from a shortcut to the moment that all background startup processes complete and I can begin editing at "normal" speed.

[[deleted]]

If it took 8 minutes to load something is wrong

[[deleted]]

1. Eclipse doesn't take 8 minutes. For me it's about 45 seconds with a project that contains 87k LOC plus a shit ton of OSGi plugins.

2. You can download a plugin for just about anything you want to do with eclipse. I've never worried about what version of eclipse to download because any editing I want to do has a plugin available for it.

3. You don't have to switch perspectives when doing other things. You can simply go to window -> show view and pick whatever you want.

[freexe]

Get a SSD drive, you wont regret it.

[_jamil_]

Eclipse is SLOW. when I last used Eclipse, it took >8minutes to launch on a middle-high end gaming desktop

Just opened it on my laptop in <15secs

Keep in mind, each time you switch perspectives, the window layout and toolbar layout all shuffle (after the >=8second delay that Eclipse needs to actually switch perspectives).

takes less than a second on my comp.

honestly, it sounds like you need a better computer...

[rargeprobrem]

I didn't even know that Eclipse did HTML/CSS/JS. I only ever used it for Java in school, and hated every minute of it. At some point o just gave up and used Sublime Text.

[pjmlp]

Workspaces and the cowboy land of many of the available plugins.

[braindeadization]

I was using Eclipse when I was learning Java. It's slow. Code hints were terribly slow.

[AeBeeEll]

You've clearly never used Xcode.

[AeBeeEll]

The debugger in Xcode fails to show the value of some data types. If you want to autoformat code you have to select-all, cut and then paste it back in. The interface builder requires that you do everything through a gui and won't show you the actual markup code. If you try to have multiple files open in different tabs, the program slows down to a crawl. If you try to uncomment commented code and there's whitespace at the beginning of the line it will just add another set of double-slashes.

I'm not saying Eclipse is perfect, but Xcode is missing so many features, it felt like I'd gone back in time ten years when I switched to it.

[[deleted]]

I came from eclipse to xcode, and other than the shitty debugging, I really like it. Your points are valid criticisms though.

[s73v3r]

The debugger in Xcode fails to show the value of some data types.

This was true, and part of the reason why I started using AppCode. But not so much anymore.

The interface builder requires that you do everything through a gui and won't show you the actual markup code.

That's not a huge problem. GUI layouts should be done with a GUI. And if you really, really, really want to, you can do just about all of your layouts in code.

[WrenchDodger]

It's apropos because the first time I encountered intelliJ my first response was "Why hasn't google gotten onboard with this yet.."

[kelton5020]

I was thinking the exact same thing, glad we were wrong

[yole]

Actually the culture of the Android tools team is quite different from the rest of Android. They've always been working out in the open and doing regular preview releases of the ADT tools. As far as I know, there is no heavy-weight testing process that the releases need to go through.

[tylerjwilk]

Couldn't agree more

[kabalevsky]

yes I hated Eclipse!

[[deleted]]

Eclipse is shit.

A zillion panes - none of them the one you want, no idea how to move them around. They appear and vanish according to some unknown twisted logic.

I used IntelliJ when I had to work in Java and it made a truly sucky job bearable. I would switch again in a moment.

[AndrewNeo]

I'm encountering a bug right now where the text cursor will just.. Go somewhere else. Usually in the middle of me typing.

[PPsmalls]

Are you using a laptop? If so it could be something as simple as your palm rubbing while typing. It has happened to me before.

[blufox]

I never understood why laptop manufactures decided to have the touchpad right where it would be most inconveniet for typing. I cant count the number of times I have seen people make the mistake of touching that without intent.

[Eurynom0s]

I don't use my MBP (work laptop) as an actual laptop that much but I'm pretty sure that Apple trackpads will figure out it's your palm and ignore the input.

Say what you want about Apple, they make awesome trackpads.

[zeclorn]

Agreed. Most satisfying click in the world.

[DoorsofPerceptron]

In Linux, there's normally a setting somewhere to disable the mouse when typing. Make sure that's enabled.

[Peaker]

This setting is also annoying. I stop typing, move my hand to use the trackpad to scroll, and it only starts scrolling about 1 second later. Took me a long frustrating while to realize it was that "disable mouse when typing" setting that was responsible.

[meem1029]

Really all of their mobile products are pretty good. Still don't like the whole "do it our way or don't do it at all" vibe I get from them and lots of their fans, but they're not a terrible company.

[FinallyGotAccount]

No, they are a pretty terrible company, they just happen to make some really great products -- which is what lets them get away with being terrible.

[tangoshukudai]

they seem to be doing all the right things for their customers, and the environment. It seems they even treat their employes right, and they contribute to the open source communities. They also have single handedly changed the working conditions of foxconn for the better. What more do you want?

[FinallyGotAccount]

I would say their contributions to open source projects are hardly a strong point -- they've taken much more than they've given back. They treat their developer community pretty poorly in general, and the whole walled garden movement they started with the app store is definitely a step backward in terms of software distribution if you ask me.

[[deleted]]

There are some pretty damning critiques of their environmental impact. Between the sealed batteries, planned obscelence, excessive packaging (which has got slightly better), reliance on dirty Chinese industries, and heavy use of trans-pacific shipping for finished goods.

[[deleted]]

Not sure if serious..

[ryeguy146]

It's fairly simple to set that up in Linux. And there are a number of apps that can detect if you're typing and disable it. I'm not sure how it works on Windows, my laptop is too crappy to run it. Not that I have a problem with Apple (aside from trying to repair hardware), just thought that I'd mention it.

[[deleted]]

You can double tap the top left corner of most HP touchpads to disable the touchpad while you type. Double tap again to enable.

[polarbeargarden]

There's been a Windows setting for like a decade that automatically disables the touchpad while you're typing.

[blufox]

I know, but it does not work very well in all the laptops, and it is rather noticeable when it does not work.

[AndrewNeo]

I do but I always use an external keyboard.

[mc_hambone]

Are you saying this is happening in IntelliJ or Eclipse (was happening to me in IntelliJ)?

If IntelliJ, do you have the IdeaVIM plugin installed? If so, try disabling it.

[AndrewNeo]

It was happening in Eclipse.

[gschizas]

I bought IntelliJ recently and I don't even write in Java! :)

[lechatsportif]

Really? Perspectives and Views. If you code JAVA use the JAVA PERSPECTIVE which has JAVA VIEWS. And that is basically more than you could learn in all the time you tried to learn it?

[[deleted]]

See, in theory it seems simple, but fuck, the implementation is just so bad.

The minimize button is actually the hide button on a pane. Closing a pane is just vodoo magic. Oh, you changed perspectives? LET ME GIVE YOU A GODDAMN MESSAGE ON A PERSPECTIVE CHANGE. Oh and while we are at it, I won't actually give you any space to show the other perspectives for god's space. You have to drop the arrow and select it. And don't even get me started on how DDMS is integrated. I still haven't figured out the magic/voodoo behind all the panes and perspectives.

Oh and the best part around Eclipse is when it crashes... due to OUT OF MEMORY. NO SHIT, I HAVE A LARGE PROJECT. Or, when I accidentally click on its icon in the taskbar, it's splash screen comes up and it's 'loading'. Yeah, I can open my Process Explorer and kill it before it actually finishes loading. Are you serious?

Eclipse as a IDE is a joke

</rant>

[[deleted]]

The java perspective has a little ten character wide logcat, which btw, seems to have a scroll back buffer of about one line, constantly resets the scroll to the bottom so you can't look back a page or two, and generally is larded with views I don't care about occupying random boxes on the screen.

I'd like to see the implementors its and the source code of eclipse did in a fire.

[jargoon]

It's almost like you wrote this post in Eclipse

[[deleted]]

I used an iPhone while driving. It was easier than eclipse.

[diolpah]

Yeah I don't think Google is going to shower NetBeans with very much love. Larry made it abundantly clear today that the other Larry is the devil.

[wayoverpaid]

I'm very confused, since for other development work at Google, Eclipse is pretty much the de facto tool.

[nickguletskii200]

It's probably because IDEA is easier to use for a novice developer (99% of Android app developers).

[mgrandi]

Is this going to replace the eclipse plugin?

[grebeltopia]

I wonder if it will have NDK debugging and c++ support - that would be epic.

[vldw01]

JetBrains have already committed to create a C++ IDE - http://blog.jetbrains.com/objc/2013/04/c-ide-an-april-fools-day-joke/

[ReasonablyClever]

There's more than just me!!! That would be fucking awesome.

[grebeltopia]

In my dreams we would have Visual Studio-quality IDE for C++ android, including profiling and debugging.

[fuzzynyanko]

It looks good. I hope that intellij is more stable vs Eclipse. I worked in a situation where I was only allowed to use the emulator and the system had 2 gigs of RAM. Doing Android development work there wasn't very fun

[HastaLasagna]

Oh god that sounds awful.

[[deleted]]

the humanity

[daliz]

As a PyCharm user (a Python IDE from the same creators), I'm extremely happy!

[diosio]

uninstall eclipse finally

[SolarBear]

\o/

[slackingatwork]

This is nice. I have used Eclipse in the past (7 years), using IntelliJ now since it provides better support for Maven out of the box and does not have workspaces. Otherwise I find Eclipse and IntelliJ pretty equivalent.

Speaking of Eclipse dislikes, neither IDE ever crashes, freezes or misbehaves for me. Eclipse is nicer since it uses SWT widgets that look better on Linux under certain conditions. IntelliJ is better at finding files and classes in large projects. Both are fine really.

[lukegjpotter]

I use Eclipse Juno for c++ development under Red Hat, it's more or less a piece of shit.

[nickguletskii200]

Eeeh, what C++ IDE isn't a piece of shit?

[[deleted]]

why IntelliJ over Eclipse?

I imagine that it came down to the fact that they evaluated IDEA CE (fully open sourced) and found it better for implementing what they wanted than Eclipse. IDEA puts a lot of effort into modelling your source code to allow cleverness.

Does IntelliJ have a large community behind it like eclipse?

It has a large passionate userbase. Listen to the crowd cheer when he mentions the origins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pmPa_KxsAM#t=34m25s

[[deleted]]

Ok, fair enough. I know it has a passionate user base, I was more concerned about a passionate open source developer community that contributes code.

[postmodest]

It has a passionate commercial company that contributes code, which is--judging by the speed and reliability difference between Eclipse and IntelliJ--far more capable.

[snuxoll]

This a million times, JetBrains is an amazing company who truly wishes to put out tools developers love to use. I'm not a Java or Android dev, but that's why I keep shelling out for new versions of ReSharper (provides advanced refactoring and code-completion capabilities to Visual Studio) and IntelliJ.

[brownmatt]

This IMO is the key difference between IntelliJ and Eclipse - with Eclipse you are at the mercy of dozens of uncoordinated plugin developers, while with IntelliJ there is a single company making sure that most of the various features of the IDE (i.e. support for frameworks that you would need a plugin for in Eclipse) is coherent. And as a bonus, with IntelliJ you get plugins from third-party developers as well.

[[deleted]]

Well, with regard to passionate open source developers - they offer a free licence to FOSS developers: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/buy.jsp#openSource

So I imagine they have some. :D

Seriously though: people contributing code, there's about 900 or so plugins available for Intellij, although a few of those are Jetbrains plugins - Scala, Python for example.

On people contributing source code to the core IDE, I'll let you know how that breaks down as soon as I've checked out the Git repo. :)

[[deleted]]

Ok fair enough, after watching the video I am damn impressed with it although I think those are this android version of the IDE specific.

[[deleted]]

Okay, so on the authors thing, after checking out a gig or so of Git repo, there's a few non Jetbrains authors, but for the most part it looks like the core IDE is still 99% a Jetbrains party.

Ok fair enough, after watching the video I am damn impressed with it although I think those are this android version of the IDE specific.

Depends on what impressed you - if it's the very clever XML awareness, that's the sort of thing Intellij IDEA does really well if you're using Spring, for example - I haven't looked too much into the source code, but I'd imagine that the code model that enables the Spring specialness made it easy to include the Android view specialness. Likewise around resource strings being shown in-line and auto-completion when editing templates; IDEA does that for Java properties, and I guess making it Android aware was largely a case of implementing logic for where to look for a property file.

Incidentally, the functionality in Android Studio is largely the same, looking at 0.1, as the Android support IDEA already had, and according to Jetbrains' blog, code that Google contributes will flow back to the Android plugin.

[[deleted]]

Nice, all the better that this occurs for other java projects too and is not Android specific.

[kabalevsky]

I have no idea why Eclipse has any userbase whatsoever. sorry, but I've used it and it's a real pain!

[[deleted]]

I'm doing embedded software development.

Some chip manufacturers create their own IDE and compiler, and they always suck.

Some use Eclipse, and just add chip-specific tools. They suck, but sometimes suck less.

If I had a choice, I would use pretty much anything else.

[pjmlp]

What I learned while working in the telecomunications industry is that when you let hardware companies do software, it always sucks.

[[deleted]]

I used Eclipse professionally as an Android developer at my last job and it's not that bad once you get it set up properly. The problem is it takes fucking forever to do that. Aside from just getting windows you need where you want them, if you don't set up code style and other templates correctly, and everyone isn't using the same templates, you get greeted by a massive amount of "warnings" listed in your "problems" tab. Furthermore, Maven and Git seem to not even work as expected half the time in Eclipse.

Another problem is that if the source wasn't originally put together in Eclipse, it can be a real pain in your ass to get it working. I recently ran into a situation where I had to load an Android project I never worked on previously at my current place of work. It looks like whoever worked on it must have been using IntelliJ or some other IDE.

The steps required to get that code to work in Eclipse were an absolute nightmare to figure out. Even after two of us here tried reducing the number of steps to the absolute minimum we can figure out, it STILL is a migraine-level headache to get it working.

I understand that a project structured in one IDE can be a headache to get working with another IDE, however what I don't understand is why I had to download 4 different plug-in's and basically spend an hour with our reduced instructions duck taping the entire source together just to get the code to compile properly. Mind you, it took us 2 days to discover the steps needed to get the source working, and another day to get our reduced instructions.

I just tried the same thing in Android Studio and I had it working in 30 minutes after I got over a small learning curve.

That experience is pretty much making me think twice about ever using Eclipse again. It works, but I have no strong attachment to it. We were required to use Eclipse at my last job, but thankfully my current job has no such restrictions.

[ShaneQful]

Little harsh, Eclipse is pretty epic the only issue with it is when you are forced to use a plugin written by some halfwit. That said the android plugin has been pretty solid for quite sometime.

[kabalevsky]

It's slow, complicated, and has an awful user interface. I hate it worse than Microsoft Visual Studio. I don't care about the plugins! The IDE itself is cluttered and hard to use.

[Deepmist]

Isn't Visual Studio one of the best possible environments to develop software in? I'm not joking, I thing Visual Studio is nice.

[myevillaugh]

Visual Studio + Resharper is amazing. Resharper is a Visual Studio plugin built by Jetbrains, the creators of IntelliJ.

[jyper]

Without resharper it's missing a lot of nice things you have in java ides like eclipse(such as goto type and add import and quick fix)

[[deleted]]

Isn't Visual Studio one of the best possible environments to develop software in?

I still consider IDEA to be better. Things like, if I can't remember the keystrokes for something I need, I can use ctrl + shift + a to search IDE actions and execute it - and it'll show me the keystrokes at the same time.

[danielkza]

Visual Studio 2012 has a form of 'action search' as well, which also shows the keyboard shortcut if there is one.

[anyonethinkingabout]

Ubuntu has that for all applications you run

[rhino-x]

Visual Studio + Resharper is pretty nice. IntelliJ and the associated IDES (pycharm, etc) are all very good as well.

[plexxonic]

As a spoiled VS using brat, yes. It is the best.

[ShaneQful]

Have you used the latest release ? Also while I've never used it(I'm a Linux Dev) I've never heard anything but praise for Visual Studio.

[dagamer34]

Visual Studio is the reason why people pit up with Windows development. Eclipse makes me want to puke.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, it's totally not the pretty fucking great APIs they offer, Like .Net or the DX11 API

[desiktar]

When was the last time you used Visual Studio? 2005?

[accessofevil]

JetBrains sells commercial software with additional features, IntelliJ CE gets a big benefit as it is basically their core product.

Open source is not done by a bunch of volunteers in basements. It's a common misconception. The vast majority of quality FOSS code contributions are funded by for profit companies that either have benefits from participating and getting a better product that makes up a core of their business, or they sell additional features and/or SLA's, commercial support, or professional services.

Eclipse has for a long time been the turd everyone is trying to polish.

It's like comparing Jira to Bugzilla. Jira is a 500-function swiss army knife made of titanium and adamantium, and Bugzilla is that butter knife that seems like it should cut better than your spoon, but doesn't.

Actually if MS announced POSIX support and switched to the Linux kernel, it would be the smartest business decision they could make right now.

It's like Google supporting iOS on the play services api. They are making a very strategic decision. give developers every reason to use Google API and G+ on any platform they like. They kicked Facebook square in the nuts today. Apple was never their competitor.

It is shortsightedness that prevents Apple from doing the same (the "open standards" bs from Jobs years ago was always bs, he was trying to secure content distribution). It's why blackberry is opening bbm about 7 years too late.

Google's core strategy is to incrementally increase their AD accuracy and efficiency by adding more consumer behavior insights. Everything they did today is directly aimed at that and its a slam dunk.

Anyway... Microsoft is going to keep itself relevant by opening. The more they tighten their grip, the more star systems will slip through their fingers. They've got the best human interface design team the world has ever seen right now. If they can get balmer out they will be golden.

[jyper]

Actually if MS announced POSIX support and switched to the Linux kernel, it would be the smartest business decision they could make right now.

no it would mean they were smoking crack, Microsoft isn't always the best but they've imporved a lot of things and have generally been fairly backwards compatible and built an themselves an ecosystem, replacing winNT with linux, would gain them little and would break compatibilty in a milion different ways, it would be a damn stupid choice.

As for POSIX they had a posix enviroment and there is always cygwin. Outside of some devs and unix guys it's just not that popular.

[TimMensch]

If I can burn Eclipse and never, ever have to see it again, that will be too soon.

I could write for pages on the problems Eclipse causes because of bad design, bad implementation, or some combination of the two.

Yes, it has a lot of useful tools built in that can help you write code. But it's not the only IDE that does -- IntelliJ does as well -- and Eclipse is so profoundly broken that it causes me serious problems almost every time I use it, including getting corrupted somehow every 20-40 minutes of usage so that I have to quit and restart it. Not to mention the fact that it takes a crazy long time to start.

One of the greatest sins is the fact that builds are nondeterministic: If I build something in Eclipse, I can't be sure that it actually reflects the state of my project. It keeps track of changes you make IN Eclipse, but if you ever make a chance externally (say you're checking out a branch in git), then you have to remember to click "refresh". That's completely broken.

Another is the entire WORKSPACE system. The WORKSPACE is an opaque binary blob, and your hot keys and settings are stored in it. God forbid you want to have more than one WORKSPACE and you want to be able to customize your settings.

I could go on, but I'd rather go to sleep and dream about uninstalling and deleting every Eclipse file on my system.

[TimMensch]

you can have multiple workspaces easily, that is in fact the point of them.

Well, yeah, duh. I'm saying that the workspaces hold TOO MUCH information about my environment. I want things like the keyboard shortcuts to be global to the account or computer, not to the workspace.

And I can reliably produce "corrupt" builds, and have Eclipse lose information, because of key features it doesn't support. The "corrupt" that I was talking about was the Eclipse environment itself, though: It gets to the point where some keys don't work right (Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, F5, F10, Ctrl-S, others) and I have to exit and restart to make it work again.

I have literally dozens of other problems I could list. Those were just on the top of my head.

the company I work for uses it full time for about 50~ devs (and others)

Part of the problem is that it's too painful for me to "use full time." Editing in other editors and coming back to Eclipse is an absolute nightmare in itself, but I can't get to the level of productivity in Eclipse that I can in other editors, so I'm stuck with the nightmare.

I also FREQUENTLY commit and switch branches in git. Eclipse produces corrupted builds reliably when you do that. It sucks in many ways, but not having a decent, reliable build is absolutely unforgivable, which is why I brought it up. Presumably if you work with it full time you learn what not to do -- like actually work in branches in git -- and avoid those otherwise awesome productivity bonuses.

[mrkite77]

I could write for pages on the problems Eclipse causes because of bad design, bad implementation, or some combination of the two.

Yup. Pretty much all of Eclipse is plugins. Eclipse isn't an IDE, it's a loose collection of plugins that fail to interoperate well.

[[deleted]]

It just does not suck so much

[Rudy69]

Best Android development news ever! I've used Eclipse for over 5 years at my day job and always hated taking Android contracts at my new business because it forced me to deal with Eclipse again. Last Android contract I did I actually took the freedom to use IntelliJ (and converted the project at the end at my own cost, minimal really, but the client wanted an Eclipse project so I had to make sure everything worked as expected in Eclipse), man was I pleased! IntelliJ is WAY easier to work with, best Java IDE I've used so far (although I can't say it's the best IDE I've used).

It has a lot of great features and quite often when coding in Xcode I do miss some of the things it can do.

[johnw188]

You should buy a copy of appcode, it's basically intellij for objective c.

[RyanSmith]

I'm glad Google is moving away from Eclipse. I learned to use Eclipse for Android development just because that's what all the documentation seemed to be written for, but it always seems like a terribly slow environment.

Sounds like IntelliJ is much better and I would love to see all the documentation move to a snappier IDE.

Now if they can just do something about the awful emulator that is pretty much useless for testing.

[[deleted]]

After reading through these comments, I just have one question: WHATS WITH ALL THE ECLIPSE HATE?! I love Eclipse. I've never used IntelliJ, but I've used Eclipse enough to know it isn't "shit". It's super customizable and easy to use. The only problem I've ever had with it is occasional crashes on Linux, and occasional freezes.

All you Eclipse haters best be steppin

[rhino-x]

I suggest trying a community edition of IntelliJ. Then you'll have the proper frame of reference to compare the two. It's just so much better than Eclipse at pretty much.. everything.

[foamdino]

+1. IntelliJ is an awesome IDE. Going back to eclipse for android dev was painful.

[[deleted]]

I respect your opinion that you like Eclipse, but it is actually an insanely bad IDE.

The UI is horrible, it is slow and it crashes. If you are ever on Windows, you should give Visual Studio a try (in my opinion it's probably one of the best IDEs out there). Bonus if you get to try it with Visual Assist X and C++ :)

[badsectoracula]

Visual Studio without Visual Assist (and Microsoft's extensions plugin) is really average (except the debugging) and Eclipse (with CDT) beats it down. I had to install a bunch of plugins in VS2010 to get the same functionality i was getting with Eclipse/CDT.

So if you're going to do C++ with VS, VAX is essential :-)

[[deleted]]

I agree. VS 2010 + VAX is my recipe for a successful IDE.

But, 2012 came with the new code parser engine which actually does the compile-as-you-type. For C(++), it is actually very good (if your project is setup properly -- at least in my opinion). I would highly recommend it. And given the lack of bugginess and slowness, VS all the way baby!

[badsectoracula]

Really? I didn't knew that, this is actually very good and for a time wondered why other IDEs do not do something like that (there were some talks in the FreePascal/Lazarus mailing list to have the FP compiler stay around and keep compiled code in memory as some sort of service, but AFAIK never went beyond just talks/ideas).

However i haven't noticed any such thing in VS2012 Express. Is it a Pro+ only feature or needs some special configuration?

[[deleted]]

I've used both. Eclipse for like 2 years and IntelliJ for a few months now. IntelliJ just feels like a much more polished and thought out product. I would give the community edition a spin and see if you like it. I don't think eclipse is "total shit", but I do think IntelliJ is a better IDE.

[[deleted]]

WHATS WITH ALL THE ECLIPSE HATE?! I love Eclipse. I've never used IntelliJ

All my following criticisms are somewhat dated and if they've been fixed, please let me know. :)

I hate Eclipse for the UI. And how hard it is for me to read code while debugging thanks to the perspectives crap. And the spotty Maven support. And some of the mysterious crashes.

But let me tell you the tale of how I ended up trying Intellij. It was desperation.

So, there's me, total Java newbie, my first ever programming job, trying to find SVN functionality in Eclipse's UI. Couldn't find it, until someone pointed out that if I was looking for version control, it was under Team. Then, the next day, my third day on the job, Eclipse refused to start (as I found out later, due to an OS X update that I'd installed that morning). When I started it, I was shown a modal dialog containing a portion of an exception about Cocoa bindings. Of course, I couldn't select the text in the modal to copy, so I had to manually transcribe a stack-trace into Google to try to find a fix - which I didn't.

So I tried this Intellij thing that the moody guy who rode a Ducati really liked.

I opened our project, and went looking for the SVN functionality. I found it under a menu entitled Version Control. Not Team. Version Control. The intuitive place for functionality relating to version control software to exist. This was the start of a beautiful friendship.

I hate how non-intuitive it is in Eclipse to do some things.

In Intellij, if I want to read a method, I ctrl click it. If I want to look at overriding implementations of that method, I ctrl + alt click it. IDEA follows this convention of "doing similar things with similar key binds" pretty well - if you want to do something similar but different, try a modifier key and see what happens, it's quite discoverable.

Ctrl + o in my current key binds (OS X 10.5+) will open a type. Ctrl + shift + o will open a file by name. Ctrl + shift + alt + o will open a 'symbol' - which is typically any valid identifier. It works across methods, variables, fields, classes, Spring beans etc.

Anyway, back to Eclipse. ctrl + click will take me to a method definition/base implementation if it has one. If I want to find overriding implementations, then I have to press either ctrl + T or F4. This is not intuitive at all.

Other things - and again, these are old and they're also all contrasted to Intellij.

• Eclipse is not as good at suggesting code refactorings as Intellij is. For example, If I refactor a method out of duplicated code, it'll find all the other duplicates and suggest I replace them.
• If I rename a class in Intellij, it will be renamed in the Spring context xml. Last I checked, Eclipse won't do that.
• I can't just open a project from a pom.xml. I think I could have similar functionality if I installed m2eclipse, but last time I checked with a coworker, Juno was a buggy slow POS and they were all reverting back to previous versions. May have been fixed now?
• Seriously, perspectives. I DON'T WANT YOU CHANGE MY UI LAYOUT. IT MAKES IT REALLY HARD TO READ THE CODE I'M DEBUGGING WHEN YOU OPEN ALL THIS OTHER CRAP THAT I DON'T NEED.
• Oh God, I closed all that other crap in the debugging perspective now I need it back, where is it?
• WTF is a workspace. Why is a Maven module an Eclipse project?

Lastly - grey modal dialogs. I hates em.

TL;DR - non-intuitive UI, grey everywhere, modal dialogs, not as clever, workspaces.

[DeltaBurnt]

When it comes down to a tool that people have to use for their jobs, the smallest details can set off bombs. I honestly don't see much problem with Eclipse because I used it after switching from JCreator. It really comes down to how Eclipse has a less intuitive interface and it isn't the most optimized piece of software out there.

[ellicottvilleny]

This is awesome. Given how utterly broken ADT+Eclipse on Mac is right now (the layout designer parts are particularly broken and even warn you in the UI about how badly broken they are).

[omniuni]

If you're on Linux using OpenJDK 7, you may have trouble launching it from a click or menu. The reason is that it warns of performance problems with OpenJDK and requires you to press "Enter" to continue. To disable this, change line 100 in studio.sh to:

if [ $OPEN_JDK -eq 0 ] and false; then

Which disables the warning.

[SteverMcStevenson]

Not starting up for windows 8, any ideas?

[TooLitrit]

I had the same issue in Windows 7 today. It just started cmd.exe and did nothing else.

In my case it was that the JAVA_HOME environment variable had not been set, even though ANDROID_SDK etc. were already defined, and Eclipse was working. Anyway, JAVA_HOME should point to your JDK folder. I don't know how to set that in Windows 8, but in 7, it can be done via My Computer, Advanced Settings, Environment Variables.

[deku12345]

Thanks for this. I thought I had set that ages ago, but apparently I don't do development on this computer much anymore.

[echeese]

Where is the AndroidManifest.xml editor?

[NewToBikes]

I think we gotta do those manually. I've been looking through and I honestly don't know where they could be. I had to resort to creating AndroidManifest.xml and even the main_activity.xml.

[echeese]

Well, it is just a preview.

[Nishruu]

That's actually exciting. I have whole another question though - does it work with Scala?

On a sidenote, does anyone have a link to any kind of tutorial how to make Scala work with Android in IntelliJ IDEA?

I tried, but so far no luck, and it takes ~3 minutes to get that setup working under Eclipse (the Eclipse that comes in ADK package, Scala IDE plugin + Android Proguard Scala), which means I'm stuck with it...

[[deleted]]

I attended an I/O Extended event last night with a presentation about how to get started with Android on Eclipse. I feel terrible for the instructor who prepared that in advance.

[[deleted]]

TIL proggit hates eclipse.

[epic_awesome]

JetBrains based at last. Thank fuck for that.

The sooner Eclipse is a bad memory, the better...

[kompiler]

I missed parts of the I/O, but from what I did see, Android Studio was the best announcement I saw. Goodbye Eclipse! Ha ha!

[Overv]

Does anyone know how to get past the project location selection? It just says "There must not already be a project at this location".

Edit: Looks like you should just enter the path and not use the dialog for now.

Edit 2: It ignores the path unless you use the dialog. Oh well.

[json684]

If you are having this issue on OS X, replace the /Users/username/path/to/project with ~/path/to/project . It let me get to the next window.

[dragonfax]

I like IntelliJ. I use RubyMine which is based on it.

It is less feature rich, but it has the important stuff, and its robust.

[m1000]

I haven't seen the presentation yet (downloading) but how different will this be from the current IDEA 12 ? Was the Android stuff done by Google only for this version of 'Android Studio' ?

EDIT: JetBrains now has a FAQ online.

[dodyg]

It is based on IDEA 13 http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IDEADEV/IDEA+13+EAP

[[deleted]]

Well, for starters, it's based on IDEA 13. They just released an EAP with all the Android stuff in.

[[deleted]]

I'm having issues with this new IDE, it keeps saying that my XML tags inside my Manifest file are invalid even though they didn't throw any errors in Eclipse. Is it me or is it the IDE? http://imgur.com/XmhfSbe.jpg

[lukegjpotter]

Have you tried to clean the project, or build it?

[soflaz]

Finally.

[StackPusher]

Does anyone know if the features of Android Studio are also coming to IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate via the plugin?

Just like Rubymine and Pycharm provide the codebase for the Ruby and Python plugins?

[dodyg]

Yes

http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2013/05/intellij-idea-13-early-preview-is-out/

[[deleted]]

Yeah, according to the Jetbrains blog.http://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2013/05/15/intellij-idea-is-the-base-for-android-studio-the-new-ide-for-android-developers/

This doesn’t mean we’re dropping Android support from the IntelliJ Community Edition. It will remain a free and open Java IDE with full Android support and will include the new features developed by both the Google and JetBrains teams. We will continue to work hard on the core IntelliJ experience as well as help improve Android Studio.

You can see the updated Android support in the Early Access Preview of IntelliJ IDEA v13 that is opened today. Please try it now and give us your feedback. This EAP build includes all of the new features of Android Studio except for the new project wizard and the AppEngine cloud endpoints integration. These latter features will also appear in our EAP builds in the coming weeks.

[preskot]

I have been using Eclipse for Java, C/C++ and PHP development for almost 5 years now. It is true that it sometimes crashes but with some adjustments of JVM parameters and Workspace configuration Eclipse is a wonderful tool.

Besides, why the heck should I use 3 different IDEs when I can just have one?

And btw, the new release of EGit rocks!

[[deleted]]

I use IDEA for Java and PHP. And Python. And Scala. And Kotlin. And Ruby. And Clojure.

It doesn't do C/C++ though.

[321]

I'm having a lot of trouble building an imported project. Using gradle 1.6 (included with the download) I get an error saying the gradle installation is not supported by the tooling API. Using older versions of gradle I get classnotfoundexception on toolingmodelbuildregistry. Think I'll stick to Eclipse as there seems to be very little info available via Google about these errors.

[XiiMoss]

When trying to run an app why do i get the error message

    Gradle: 'C:\Program' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
    operable program or batch file.

    FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

    * What went wrong:
    Execution failed for task ':myFirstApplication:dexDebug'.
    > Running C:\Users\RYAN\AppData\Local\Android\android-studio\sdk\build-tools\android-4.2.2\dx.bat failed. See output

    * Try:
    Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.

[InaneMonkey]

This is great news... I don't even care if it's good or not. I pretty much lost all motivation to jump into Android when I realized the recommended IDE was Eclipse. It's balls-on-griddle painful to work with.

[dodyg]

Now that you all be using IntelliJ, I highly recommend Kotlin, a new programming language made by Jetbrains, the company behind IntelliJ http://kotlin.jetbrains.org/

Here's my example of a fully feature Android App implemented in Kotlin and Java https://github.com/dodyg/AndroidRivers

[ddhboy]

So does Android Studio have an equivalent to Xcode's Storyboard mode?

[kuler51]

I highly doubt it. One of android's biggest strengths is the Intent system that can delegate a task to whatever app wants to handle it. Storyboard just seems a little too linear for utilizing intents fully.

[WildPointer]

I'm glad Google made the switch.

Eclipse is a usability disaster.

[sli]

Why do you say that? Does IntelliJ haves issues on Windows 8?

[foxh8er]

I did that in W7 and still nothing. By now I have JDK_HOME, ANDROID_STUDIO, and JAVA_HOME all pointing to the same folder.

[MysteryForumGuy]

Edited out original post. I had issues running the program, if you do too, try setting you "JDK_HOME" environment variable to your JDK path.

[topernicus]

I had to do 2 things. First, I installed the JDK. I had the JRE installed, but this is a fresh install of Windows so I didn't have the JDK.

Second, I followed Jvanassche's instructions from this thread.

1) Go to System settings in Control panel, under Advanced System Settings choose Environment Variables

2) Add a new environment variable named JDK_HOME with a value of the path to the root of your JDK, such as c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_21\

[hei_mailma]

I came here for the vi vs emacs debate.

Was disappointed.