Google pushes 'go' on Android Studio Worried Oompa-Loompas are questioning security guards and combing the wilds of Mountain View after it was discovered that Google has allowed a product, the Android Studio IDE, to escape from the Chocolate Factory's near-impenetrable Beta compound. The production-ready code has been spotted in the wild here after spending 18 …
Writing a complete Android development enand toolchain ontop of IntelliJ is no mean feat.
Anyone that's been using Android Studio for 6+ months or more will know that it's beta status was more than deserved.
Infact I would say its only actually become production ready in the last 3 months or so, so sorry to destroy your pathetic bandwagon you have jumped on, you sir, are an idiot.
I have a lot to thank Android Studio for.
I started using it for production about a year ago, even though it was pre-release I found it as stable as Eclipse, but 10x faster. It introduced me to IntelliJ's IDEA breed of IDEs and made me realise the grass is much greener outside Visual Studio (of which I've been using since 1.5).
It's an IDE that let me use an OS that I want (ie, not Windows), and that's when I completely moved away from Windows development and started enjoying my work.
It's also really nice that InteliJ understand that some of us are lumbered with Microsoft tools in our day jobs, so being able to use VS keybindings in IntelliJ/Android Studio is a good thing...
Using both Apple tools and Android tools, Android Studio is the king of mobile development, it's a very comprehensive package, and totally free. (a lifetime Android developer publishing account is like $25 or so). Very cheap and easy to get into Android Development.
Allow me to differ.
Using Xamarin Forms I attempted to write a sample app. To add something as plain as a checkbox I had to download a community developed controls nuget package which when deployed and their checkbox is added to a simple grid made the whole grid disappear without so much as an exception, never mind trace output. the labels they replaced worked fine before though.
When it's a struggle to get a simple checkbox to show up I quickly cut my losses and switch frameworks. There is no point in continuing if you know this is the struggle it's going to be. I'd rather spend my development hours developing than beating my head on the keyboard and save myself from a future of slow and frustrating debug cycles.
I'd rate Android Studio as about a million times as good as Eclipse, and I've also used RubyMine at work so I understand the value of the JetBrains IDE as a transferrable skill. But...
IntelliJ is built in Java. So to use it you have to expose your machine to Oracle's vision of a runtime. Ironically for a just-in-time compiler, it seems to have absolutely no concept of just-in-time launching. Let your machine be forever burdened with Java overhead at boot regardless of what you intended to do that day.
It's also quite visibly not native software. It makes a pretty good stab at hitting a middleground between the OSes and is nowhere near Swing-level awfulness but expect normal cues to be absent and to go ignored. Git integration is one of the obvious examples: you may have your machine set up with an SSH key and all your other appropriate configuration but Android Studio comes with its own embedded version of Git that'll ignore all of that and insist you supply Google's software with your username and password. Presumably just using the Git you already have proved to be an issue across targets.
Then there's the real blight: that emulator. The default is painful and only a computer nerd could love the labyrinth of third-party options and associated manual configuration. Guess what? Being a developer doesn't automatically mean loving configuration. For me HAXM is a default install and lots of people love Genymotion but it feels like an issue is that the first-party tool just isn't up to snuff.
Other grab bag complaints: gradle wants a network connection before you can build anything. There's still no nexus between the IDE and the package manager; the one can know that you're trying to use API 21 and the other can know that API 21 is available but you're the agent that has to transfer the knowledge.
But I think Google can advance in leaps and bounds when it wants. Android 1.6 was awful. Even 2.x retained significant issues, both technical (no accelerated drawing) and in the user interface (that menu button that nobody ever spotted). So probably the future's bright.
>IntelliJ is built in Java. So to use it you have to expose your machine to Oracle's vision of a runtime
Well, I ain't no fan of Java myself, but, in the context of an Android dev environment, wouldn't many other tools besides the IDE proper require you to have Java? So, it's not like you are installing Java just for the IDE.
(Still teed-off that my printer (Brother!) required a Java applet to configure its wifi and that JRE doesn't have a proper full uninstall on OSX, as I subsequently found out. Very 1990's, both).
Forms is still pretty immature, though it is moving along fast. I'm still not sure about its advantage over "traditional" UIs for the three mobile platforms. Personally I prefer the flexibility of individually designed front ends. Forms has too much of a whiff of AWT about it.
The real advantage in Xamarin is that you can share data and business logic/rules and bind them to the individual UI front ends (easy as both iOS and Android are MVC based and Windows Phone is MVVM).
Then there is the distinct advantage that all three platforms can be coded in a single language (C#) (or F# if you really want to)
I think Xamarin starts offering value when you're developing for two or three platforms (iOS, Android and WinPhone).
In preparation of my Xamarin adventure I read Creating Mobile Apps with Xamarin.Forms by Microsoft Press and it too recommends familiarizing yourself with the platform specific Xamarin API's. So if you're targeting a single platform there will be overhead. Familiarity with C# and .Net might balance things out again though.
"I think Xamarin starts offering value when you're developing for two or three platforms (iOS, Android and WinPhone)."
Yes, and that is the main purpose of the platform. Anyone who wants to create a mobile app will certainly want to target as many potential users/customers as possible, that means, at least, iOS and Android.
The Xamarin platform cuts the development time down by some 35% over two platforms and more like 50% over 3 (though it does depend on the balance between business logic and UI). It also allows to to divide your programming resources more economically. You don't need separate Objective C / iOS, Java / Android and Windows Phone / C# developers.
"What advantages does the former have over the latter for Android development?"
You can develop for iOS, Android and Windows phone in C# sharing 75% to 90+% of code between them and use most of the core .NET feature any C# coder will be familiar with.
It also make more economic sense. Why develop three completely separate apps in three different languages when you don't have to?
OK, if you are only targeting Android and you are already experienced in Java/Android there isn't much to be gained, but we develop for all three.
I've installed and run in on two machines - my 2 core laptop and a 4 core machine. Neither of them do KVM and using the virtual machines is nigh on impossible unless you're hacking all day. Easily 20 minutes to start the bloody thing and snapshot seems to make no difference.
Mind you that is down to the standard SDK - but its too slow to use occasionally. It works OK on a USB plugged device but not good for testing lots of options.
Intellij and Git. Yuck, yuck, yuck.
Its enough to make you quit development. I do hope they come up with a new flavour of the month to replace git soon, as its a total stinking pile of shite.
Intellij doesn't build, just indexes. The shortcuts are different. Its really ugly. I mean like REALLY UGLY. There's no decent SVN support. Its not free. I've used Eclipse for almost 20 years now in various forms (RAD,WSAD). I'll stick with that thanks.
> I do hope they come up with a new flavour of the month to replace git soon, as its a total stinking pile of shite.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with it? I've used most of the "free" ones over the years (CVS, SVN, mercurial, GIT), and managed to avoid the uber systems (Perforce, etc), and TBH git seems to be the best of those that I have tried.
It's fast, flexible, and generally comes with a whole pile of features which I can't get in the others (although mercurial has some of them). Once I embraced the concept of a local repo with local commits for my working copy I suddenly became a whole load more productive. Just don't try to use it like a drop-in swap for a traditional CVS/SVN - it will drive you crazy and you'll never actually get any of the benefits.
Is it perfect? No - I miss having a global incrementing version for trunk (my only feature gripe - and one which I have "emulated" simply by tracking the hash history over time for each major branch I maintain), and it does have a learning curve, but it is one hell of a powerful tool.
Eh, eh. Rational Clearcase anyone? Round 98 or so...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1074580/clearcase-advantages-disadvantages
- 4 (separate) services to run on Windows, before you could use it.
-each time I boot I got about 3-4 notices about "urgent" CC problems on those services, before I even thought of bringing up the GUI to manage anything.
-back then I didn't know version control software, and the need to use a control applet with about 10-15 tabs, each with 10-15 fields, certainly didn't enlighten me very much. A model of how to design interfaces.
- our clever architect/tech lead team had a 60-70 page document on how to use CC, but it basically kinda boiled down to checking one checkbox in one of the 15 tabs, somewhere, 90% of the time. Oh, and dunno if they didn't understand branching or CC didn't do it well, but branching was basically used in a broken fashion for about a year or two.
Most of my work was in-database, and I only need to check-in files 2-3 times a year, so I would forget the whole miserable mess each time around. I finally made a deal with my colleague and neighbor. I would help him with particularly hairly SQL queries and he'd wrangle with CC on my behalf on the rare occasion.
Good times.
I tried a bit of SVN and it seemed OK, but I really like git and the fact that it meshes in so well with bash and the command line. Still finding my way around, but it works quite well.
YMMV, but please do use a VCS, on your own if your shop is too backwards. World of difference and don't let an abomination like CC disgust you like it did me. You'd be surprised how many folks still rely on copying folder full of files as a backup.
And there you go. I want an IDE thanks. That I is INTEGRATED. That means I do not have a command line.
WHY THE FUCKING FUCKITY FUCK WOULD I WANT A COMMAND LINE!!!!?!?!?!!
So git is like working with your eyes stabbed out and your hands cut off. You have no clue what it does. You cannot see what others are doing. You cannot deviate from its process for even one second. It says "development works like this", but it does not cater for my use cases, and can never be made to. If something goes wrong, and it will coz its shite, you're only recourse is to delete everything you've ever done and start again. Period. That's it. Try running some bizarre undocumented commands? Oh yeah that helps...coz now the server is corrupted too.
I have personally witnessed at least 1000 development hours lost to git. Lost commits. Failed merges. Overwritten changes. Hours and hours and hours of no one being able to work coz its fucked.
And it has no Windows support. Now, I know this will hurt you all, but Windows is STILL the most popular development environment. Oh Yes. So why would you build a crappy command line system with no documentation and no UI and no Windows version? Its madness?
And why would you take the barely usable, half arsed system knocked up in a few hours by a total dickhead because he happened to have an argument with someone? WHAT THE FUCK HAS HAPPENED TO THE FUCKING WORLD???
> WHY THE FUCKING FUCKITY FUCK WOULD I WANT A COMMAND LINE!!!!?!?!?!!
TortoiseGIT for Windows?
EGit for Eclipse?
> And it has no Windows support.
I mean "Git Windows" on Google throws up about 3 or 4 different download sites at the first downloads. "No support", sure.
> with no documentation
http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
Sometimes I think organizations roll out tools without teaching their staff the first thing about how to use them. WHAT THE FUCK HAS HAPPENED TO THE FUCKING WORLD???
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