Android Studio is an IDE based on IntelliJ IDEA used for android application development. It is released on 15th may 2013. This tool has more options for Android Development, making the process faster and more productive. A “live layout” was shown that renders your app as you’re editing in real-time.
Prior to Android Studio, developers were relying only on the open source eclipse as IDE with ADT plugin for android development. Due to this android was always falling back compared Apples xCode IDE for iOS based development. After android studio release Google can equally bet with iOS platform in terms of development assets. Now let’s see more of the IDE capabilities.
Android studio is based on IntelliJ IDEA, which does all the functionality that Eclipse with ADT plug-in do, with lot more additional features. The initial version of android studio offers
- Gradle-based build support.
- Android-specific refactoring and quick fixes
- Lint tools to catch performance, usability, version compatibility and other problems
- ProGuard and app-signing capabilities
- Template-based wizards to create common Android designs and components.
- A rich layout editor: it allows you to drag-and-drop UI components, preview layouts on multiple screen configurations. Preview appears instantly as you change in the layout editor. You can choose a language, and can see the preview of layout with that locale.
- Rich Color Preview editor: While adding colors as a resource, and we can see the color preview at the left hand side of the editor.
- Deep Code Analysis: If you point to a line and it gives detailed explanation about an exception based on the annotation added. And you can also know which constants are allowed for which API. It also has the powerful code completion. You can also inspect code in whole project, InteliJ lists all Lint errors during code inspection.
Note: Android Studio is currently available as an early access preview. Several features are either incomplete or not yet implemented and you may encounter bugs. If you are not comfortable using an unfinished product, you may want to instead download (or continue to use) the ADT Bundle (Eclipse with the ADT Plug-in)
With this new features, hope it will help developers to get their development faster.
Gradle Based Build System
Android Studio is an IDE based on IntelliJ IDEA that uses gradle build system. In eclipse, you can create only one build at a time. Which means, first create debug build and later you can create a release build by signing with your keystore.
- Android Studio projects are setup to build both a debug and a release version of the application. The debug version is signed with the developer key store key which is created automatically (Same as eclipse debug builds). The release is not signed during the build, this needs to happen after.
- Android Studio, make it easy to create several variants of an application, either for multi-apk distribution or for different flavors of an application. This means, you can have different builds for debug, release or may be different variant build from the same code.
- Eclipse ADT plugin, always generate single R.java file but, Android Studio supports multiple. The generated R.java is located in the debug folder. You can change your build variant between debug and release and accordingly it will create the R.java file in selected debug or release directory.
Change the build type configuration here from the bottom left corner in your android Studio.
Android (Software Development Kit) SDK & Tools
On top panel we have option for SDK Manager click on SDK Manager
