Android Studio: our new, shiny Android IDE

by Alex Ruiz on May 16, 2013

The cat is out of the bag: yesterday, during Google I/O‘s keynote, we announced our new IntelliJ IDEA-based Android IDE, Android Studio. This is what my team has been working on for the past months.

From what I read on the web, Android Studio has been pretty well received. I personally heard nice comments about it, from “awesome!” to “fantastic!” and “really cool.”

Here are some highlights about Android Studio. I’ll be writing more detailed blogs about our IDE soon. Before I continue, let me make this clear:

This is a personal blog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, Google.

With that out of the way, here we go:

Our goal is to be Gradle-centric

We are working closely with the Gradleware folks on a new Gradle-based build system. Right now, with Android Studio, you can create new Gradle-based Android projects or import existing ones. When you build your project in Android Studio, we disable the default IDEA Java builders and delegate the build to Gradle. You get the same output from building within Android Studio or from the command line. Our goal is to have Gradle build files as the only source of truth.

This is an early access preview

Even though it is possible to create applications with Android Studio, there are still rough corners, bugs and features that we have not implemented yet. It would be great to get as many bug reports and feature requests from early adopters. Here is the list of known issues.

We still support Eclipse

We will be supporting Eclipse ADT as well. In fact, we plan to add similar Gradle support to ADT. The catch here is that given limitations in Eclipse, especially JDT, we cannot guarantee a development experience as smooth as Android Studio. You can, however, export your Eclipse-based Android project as a Gradle project, and then import it into Android Studio.

This is not a fork of IntelliJ IDEA

We have been working, and continue to work, really close with JetBrains, the folks behind the best Java IDE, IDEA. They implemented the changes we needed in their platform in order to develop Android Studio. Eventually, you will be able drop Android Studio as a plug-in into your copy of IDEA.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for more Android Studio posts :)

Update: Xav‘s and Tor‘s Google I/O talk “What’s New in Android Developer Tools” is on YouTube!

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Joining the Android project at Google

by Alex Ruiz on February 25, 2013

I’m most excited to announce my new adventure! Today is my first day as part of the Android project at Google. In particular, I’ll be working on tooling for Android.

For the past 2 years I worked in the Eclipse tooling team (also at Google.) I had the privilege to work with an amazing group of people. Thank you, guys, for the best years of my career!

(Image taken from jainaj stream under the creative commons license)

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Interviewing with Google? Read this!

November 19, 2012

In response to my post, “My team at Google is hiring,” I got a lot more résumés than I expected. This is absolutely great! Many thanks to all the folks interested in working in my team! While chatting with a few of the potential candidates, I offered some advice on interviewing with Google. This is [...]

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Weekend Project: Thread Dump Viewer for Eclipse

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Fluent interfaces: don’t chain for the sake of chaining

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One of the goals of FEST-Assert 2.0 is to learn from the mistakes we made in the 1.x releases, even if that means not being backwards-compatible. Not fully understanding the semantics of the API we were building, is, IMHO, one of the biggest mistakes we made in FEST 1.x. We were not able to see [...]

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My team at Google is hiring

September 13, 2012

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FEST named finalist In ATI Automation Honors

September 10, 2012

I’m pretty happy to announce that FEST has been named a finalist in the 4th Annual ATI Automation Honors. The winner will be announced at the TestKIT 2012 Conference. If you are happy FEST user, please vote for us! :) Update: FEST’s home page was down, most likely due to the recent problems GoDaddy is [...]

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Never, ever use Iterable as a return type

September 6, 2012

This is a short rant. Please do not use Iterable as a return type. Its Javadoc states that Implementing this interface allows an object to be the target of the “foreach” statement. That’s the only purpose of this interface. Other than that, this interface is almost useless, or at least a PITA to consume. For [...]

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A handy setup for writing articles for developerWorks, using Eclipse

August 22, 2012

Today, IBM developerWorks published the article I recently wrote, “Integrate an external code checker into Eclipse CDT.” When writing for developerWorks, we have the option to write in three formats: Word, Write or XML. Since I find it pretty painful to use Word or Write, I usually choose the XML format. developerWorks provides a pretty [...]

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New Terminal plug-in for Eclipse!

July 18, 2012

I’m pretty happy to announce the first release of our terminal plug-in for Eclipse! This plug-in provides a fully-working, command-line terminal to Eclipse 3.7 or later (yes, even 4.2!) It works on Linux and MacOS only. Why a terminal? At Google we have several interactive command-line tools that we need to invoke from Eclipse. It [...]

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