In this blog, we share our experience in moving towards the new Android Studio from the previous platform of Eclipse.
At the outset, we used Eclipse to develop android apps. There was a downside while debugging and designing the layouts. To resolve this, we needed to restart Eclipse often. We faced an issue with emulators too. In Eclipse we need to integrate ADT tools manually whereas in Android studio it is integrated.
We started using Android Studio IDE for Android application development now. The drawbacks in Eclipse has been overcome in Android Studio. We have listed below the optimal features of Android Studio which makes it better over Eclipse.
Optimal features of Android Studio.
– Android Studio provides Gradle-based (maven) build support.
– Using Gradle which is one of the good features to have control over the build, create different application flavours, different signing configurations and so on.
– Lint tools to catch performance, usability and version compatibility.
– It provides support for building apps for Android wearables, Android TV. Android Auto and Google glass along with phones and tablets.
– It has built-in support for google cloud platform, enabling integration with Google cloud messaging and app engine.
– Easy customisation on project code refactoring and quick fixing.
– Helps to improve the Performance like working with eclipse difficult to debugging and designing layouts.
– Helps in performance analysis tools.(Rendering, battery, compute analysis tool).
– Supports in build variants (Development and production APIs) and multiple APK generations.
– Start projects using template code for patterns such as navigation drawer and view pages, and even import Google code samples from GitHub.
– Rich layout and colour preview editor with support for theme editing.
– Having Memory performance monitor to control the memory.
– Dynamic Layout Preview enabling users to see and edit via drag&drop how their mobile app appears on multiple devices and across API versions.
– Code Completion – the most important part is when the IDE tells me the member names of an object. In general, I found that the code completion is better on Android Studio than Eclipse, which seems to get a little confused at times and doesn’t always give accurate results.
– It supports Android’s C/C++ NDK
– Autocomplete feature: Compared with eclipse more user-friendly and auto-complete text edit.
– Layout view – In the layout view, you have the option to view both the actual layout and the XML at the same time, while in Eclipse you must choose between the two tabs.
– Changes in project structure and creating new files using templates.
