
Android Studio 2.0 Is Google’s New, Improved Development Suite - rafa2000
http://www.zco.com/blog/android-studio-2-0/
======
moflome
Maybe this is better left as a comment SO, but we have been unable to any
recent version of Android Studio for our development team for the past four
months because we use a mapFragment in our app. It's a known error [0] in the
Maps API v2. I understand the complexity Google is facing, but I can't imagine
Apple not addressing such a fundamental UI capability in their dev tools.
Frustrating.

[0] [https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-
issues/issues/detail?id=...](https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-
issues/issues/detail?id=9021)

~~~
eco
For several months XCode would just crash when I tried to run my application
with debugging. It was eventually fixed by an XCode update.

I think the only large platform owning company that has really succeeded with
development tools is Microsoft. With Microsoft's newfound interest in cross
platform development I'm looking forward to the day when I can just develop
entirely in Visual Studio.

~~~
ikurei
Worked as a .net dev for ~3 years, and I loved VS, but it had its share of
random problems too. I remember it flipping out and suddenly consuming a
shitload of CPU and RAM for no apparent reason, even working on fairly small
projects. It was nearly impossible to work with it until I switched to a more
powerful PC.

Is it really fair to say xCode is not a successful tool? A lot of people use
it, and I don't hear enough complains about it.

And what is the most common tool for Android development? I assumed it'd be
Android Studio by now, is everyone still on Eclipse?

~~~
pjmlp
Those of us that also use the NDK are mostly using Visual Studio, NVidia
CodeWorks or trying to keep using Eclipse CDT tooling (there is a fork of it).

Google deprecated the Eclipse CDT and ndk-build support, went silent for two
years, announced an initial CLion integration at last Google IO and since
Android Studio 1.5, its support or NDK support for that matter, hardly
changed.

------
retox
Move fast, break all the tutorials.

Android has a problem with churn in tooling.

~~~
aswanson
Ive noticed this across the board with google with regard to developers. They
half-ass everything programmers need to interface and use what they produce.
Very frustrating.

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dkopi
Long time eclipse user, impossible to go back after using android studio. It
feels like programming with one hand tied behind my back.

~~~
beefsack
I'm always surprised at how many people willingly put up with Eclipse's
clunkiness and performance problems, regardless of how many functions it
provides.

~~~
pjmlp
Because most of the time we don't have a choice.

At work, I am yet to get a customer that allows us to use anything but
Eclipse. At home I rather use Netbeans for Java projects.

For Android, the Android Studio barely supports the NDK. So we are left with
the older Eclipse CDT plugins, Visual Studio or NVidia CodeWorks.

~~~
dkopi
NDK work accounts for a small percentage of android work. If you're more
comfortable with NDK on eclipse, that doesn't mean you can't build your ELFs
in eclipse, and the rest of your project in Android Studio.

~~~
pjmlp
Looking for the amount of APKs that have at least one .so in them, the reality
speaks otherwise.

Also that is a very lame excuse for the cold reality, that in spite of the
very complex hiring standards of Google, they aren't able to write an IDE that
offers an overall experience for their own platform.

~~~
dkopi
Having an .so in your app doesn't mean the majority of work in your app is NDK
work. And it's often limited to just one or two team members while the rest
are working on the java side of the app. You also don't need the NDK at all to
include an .so in your app. You only need the NDK to build the .so. When it
comes to regular android java work (which is the fair share of android
development, as google obviously knows from anonymous statistics) - Android
Studio takes eclipse hands down.

As for the google rant, I'm not a google employee, but I think their work has
been amazing. Are there improvements I'd like to see? of course. But I've
never understood how easy it is for people to trash talk the work of others
given an anonymous nickname online.

~~~
pjmlp
If you look at my karma and post history you can easily find me.

I don't do trash talk, just tell my opinion as a hard truth and I stand by my
opinion.

I learned through my life to stand by what I believe, without gaming up and
down votes.

I would express the same opinion at Google IO, if given the opportunity to be
there.

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steaminghacker
I switched to Studio 2.0 hoping for better NDK support over 1.5.

However, it appears to still require the experimental Gradle plug-in. Which,
frankly, isn't very good.

I'm still building my native .so separately using NDK build. I don't get any
native code debugging either.

Is there something obvious I'm missing?

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mattezell
Does anyone ever actually experience greater emulator performance under
Windows? Each time an update is pushed, I am excited to always see "XX faster
emulator" listed as an improvement - but never do I see a notable
improvement... So far, the only usable "emulator" that I've found is actually
virtualization using Xamarin's Android Player...

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swiley
What's wrong with a sane makefile oriented thing with a small tool chain and
letting the user pick the editor/IDE? Why does every large company build out
this ridiculous IDE for their product?

~~~
lallysingh
I usually use the command line for Android work, with emacs. But people demand
IDEs these days. So here we are.

~~~
ajford
Any chance you feel up to sharing? I've been wanting to get into Android dev
work, but I'm staunchly a CLI guy, and I've had a hard time trying to figure
out the IDEs Google keeps pushing out. Not to mention the obscene sizes of
these damn IDEs.

~~~
ojiikun
most Android projects these days use gradle. install it via your favourite
package manager, and if the project is well-configured a simple 'gradle build'
will do the trick. at the worst you might need to download the latest Android
SDK, point some environment vars, and do a basic fetch of the most recent
build tools.

android is rather cli friendly - a full 50% of the devs I know use vim or
emacs.

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Hexigonz
I need to upgrade, the amount of random steps I had to take to make the old AS
even remotely manageable was a headache.

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homero
Why's it so hard just to get adb these days? My adb requires like 5gb of other
stuff

------
butz
And it is still slower than good old Eclipse.

~~~
guelo
I don't think it's the IDE, it's the build system. When Google pushed everyone
over to Android Studio they also pushed everyone from Ant to Gradle. Gradle is
supposed to be a better Maven but it's just dog slow. Just typing _gradle
--help_ takes over 3 seconds on my Macbook Pro.

~~~
airless_cotton
Migrating to sbt-android has been a revelation coming from Gradle.

It's bizarre that a one-man-team beats the mighty Google in pretty much
everything.

The build is so freaking fast that it runs ProGuard by default – and beats a
Gradle build without ProGuard.

That dev implemented and shipped Instant Run way before Google "invented" it,
and it's still faster compared to Google's implementation.

~~~
pjmlp
I really don't get their hype around Gradle, if it wasn't for it, most likely
no one would care about Groovy any more.

Since my focus is the NDK, which keeps being half-done in Gradle, I keep using
Ant + ndk-build and have migrated to Visual Studio 2015 for my Android hobby
coding.

~~~
airless_cotton
As far as I know, sbt-android just recently got even more support/features for
NDK (on top of the existing support):

The plugin can now manage and auto-install SDKs, tools, support repos and
NDKs, so no messing around with Google's `android` tool anymore!

Maybe this is of use to you.

[https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-
android/commit/7b32e55f...](https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-
android/commit/7b32e55f340638fa5f2cda5817900ea1446456e3)
[https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-
android/commit/53b855de...](https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-
android/commit/53b855de4d2a51b6fbf9358e87a511dca8d933b9)

~~~
pjmlp
Thanks!

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wired_devil
So, how to enable material design?

