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Oct

Google Working On New Android Build System To Replace, Unify Eclipse's ADT And Ant – Devs Can Try It Now

Posted by Liam Spradlin in Android OS, Development, News

Looking to create a more versatile and powerful build system for Android developers, Google has been working on what is currently called "New Build System," a tool that aims to (one day) replace, unify, and build upon the functionality of Eclipse's ADT and Ant build systems.

While the new build system is still in very early stages (just reaching build 0.1 today) and not yet ready to build ship-able apps, it's already proving useful. Our own Artem cites the ability to build both dev and production versions of apps simultaneously and the ability to use the same build process between ADT and Linux as signs that the project is already showing great potential.

Oct

Motorola And Google Open Source And Merge Key Parts Of MOTODEV Studio Into AOSP

Posted by David Ruddock in Android OS, Development, Motorola, News

For some time, Motorola Mobility has offered its MOTODEV Studio for Android suite as a standalone alternative build on Eclipse. A lot of developers seemed to like the additional tools Moto built into Studio, but weren't exactly keen on dropping Eclipse in exchange for Moto's less open solution.

Now that Motorola is a part of Google, it seems that state of affairs just won't do. Earlier today, on the official Motorola blog, the company announced it was open sourcing key parts of MOTODEV Studio and merging them into the Android Open Source Project. Looking at the commits (here), head of the ADT/Tools team at Google, Xavier Ducrohet, seems to have been involved extensively in the process.

Jun

[Video] Android Developer Gold: Multi-Configuration Editing, Along With Numerous New Improvements, Coming Soon To Android Developers' Tools

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Development, News, Videos

The Android developers' tools team, headed by the usual suspects Xavier Ducrohet and Tor Norbye, led a session at I/O 2012 today dedicated to improvements and new features coming to the tools devs use to make apps - ADT for Eclipse and SDK Tools.

Everything they showed took around an hour of nonstop talking, arm flailing, and cracking jokes about the French, but among all the new goodies one prominently stood out - multi-configuration editing. The developer in me got incredibly excited and wished this tool was available years ago, because the potential time savings it brings are immense.

Basically, multi-configuration editing is a way to visualize your layout on multiple configurations at once.

Jun

SDK Tools Revision 20 And ADT20 Now Available – Developers, Start Your Engines

Posted by Liam Spradlin in Android OS, Jelly Bean 4.1, News

Coinciding with the announcement of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Android developers can now pull down a new revision of Android's SDK tools – revision 20, along with a new version of the ADT Plugin, also r20 (which Eclipse users will need to use SDK r20).

The revised SDK tools bring several improvements. One of the notable additions to the SDK tools is System Trace (otherwise known as systrace), a tool (included in Project Butter) that helps monitor system activities, allowing developers to pinpoint graphical rendering or other issues. For those wondering just what else is new, take it from the revision notes found at Android's Developer site:

General notes:

Added new Device Monitor application, grouping Android debugging tools into a single application, including ddms, traceview, hierarchyviewer and Tracer for GLES.

Apr

[For Developers] ADT 20/SDK Tools r20 Previews Are Here - Brand New Property Editor(!), NDK Support, Performance Improvements, Bug Fixes Galore

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Development, News

As an Android developer, I like to keep tabs on the tools I use every day, especially ones as important as ADT for Eclipse and SDK Tools. As was the case several times before, the Android team in charge of both of them posted previews of upcoming releases of ADT 20 and SDK Tools r20, available for manual download ahead of the final releases.

Yup, you heard me correctly - 20, not 18 or 19. Even though the previous major release was 17, 18 followed up shortly after with some minor changes, and 19, even more minor, wasn't even posted to the downloads page (see here for the reason).

Feb

For Developers: ADT 17 And SDK Tools r17 Previews Available For Download, Now With Network Usage, Fixed Proguard, Enhanced Lint, And More

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Development, News

In preparation for the upcoming final releases, the Android team today released ADT 17-preview (Android Developer Tools plugin for Eclipse) and SDK Tools r17-preview with the following improvements that eager developers can try out without waiting any longer.

What's New

Out of all the additions and changes, I'm mostly excited about the new network usage tool, the fix for the dreaded "Conversion to Dalvik format failed with error 1" error when trying to use Proguard (oh, how many hours I wasted on this one), and the end to default ids for various layout elements. Sweet deal.

Here's the full changelog:

New Features

DDMS can now show the live detailed network usage of an app (More Info)

ProGuard
Bundled ProGuard updated to version 4.7.

Dec

[Update: Now With ICS Source] Gold For Android Developers: Add AOSP Source Code To Eclipse With The "Android Sources" Plugin

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Android OS, Cupcake 1.5, Development, Donut 1.6, Eclair 2.1, Froyo 2.2, Gingerbread 2.3, Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0, Tips & Tutorials

As an Android developer, the first thing I do when I set up Eclipse with ADT on a new machine is hunt down the Android source for the API level I'm working on.

Earlier this month, I added a request for Android 4.0 source to be added to the plugin, and I'm pleased to report that the plugin maintainer just added it to the latest version.

Honeycomb sources are being worked on.

Note: If you already have the plugin installed, you'll need to re-install for this addition to show up.

Developers should understand what I'm talking about, but for the rest of you - this priceless little addition to our development process means whenever we want to see just what exactly Android is doing at a certain point in our programs, we can actually take a peek.

Nov

Developer Goodies: Eclipse ADT 16/Tools r16 Will Introduce Android Lint To Help You Automatically Catch Those Pesky Errors Early

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Development, News

To help Android developers automate some things and catch certain errors early on, the Android Tools team is pushing ahead with a new dev tool called Android Lint. Android Lint will be available in the next release of ADT (16) and Tools (r16).

If you're not familiar with the "lint" paradigm, a lint tool generally helps you validate your code using a certain set of rules in order to avoid common pitfalls. For example, PHP has PHPLint, JSON has jsonlint and so on.

As for Android Lint, its features at launch will include the following:

Missing translations (and unused translations)
Layout performance problems (all the issues the old layoutopt tool used to find, and more)
Unused resources
Inconsistent array sizes (when arrays are defined in multiple configurations)
Accessibility and internationalization problems (hardcoded strings, missing contentDescription, etc)
Icon problems (like missing densities, duplicate icons, wrong sizes, etc)
Usability problems (like not specifying an input type on a text field)
Manifest errors
and many more

You can find all the current checks Android Lint performs here.

Oct

For Developers: Android SDK Tools r15 And ADT 15 Bug Fixers Now Available

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Android OS, Development, News

The Android 4.0 API that was released together with the unveiling of the Galaxy Nexus also brought us, developers, ADT 14 and SDK Tools r14, which quite a few people started having problems with almost immediately. The tools were released in an incomplete state based on my experience with ADT 14-preview, as some serious and known bugs weren't fixed when 14-final came out. I have a feeling the ICS event kind forced the corresponding ADT/tools 14 release and prompted Google to roll it out in what I consider a broken state (many reported crashes, broken Logcat, etc).

Thankfully, the tools team (hi, Tor and Xav!) persistently worked on the issues and just released ADT 15 and SDK Tools 15, brining much relief to those of us experiencing said problems (the un-pausable scrolling Logcat was killing me in the last few weeks).

Oct

Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) SDK and ADT 14 Released

Posted by Ron Amadeo in Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0, News

Developers, start your engines. Fresh Ice Cream Sandwich versions of the SDK and ADT have been released. There is a ton of new stuff to learn and play with. For starters, take a look at the 4.0 platform page here, download the 4.0 SDK here, and instructions for ADT 14 are over here.

I think I could write a book on all the new things in ICS, but here are the highlights for developers:

Unified UI framework for phones, tablets, and more - All the UI elements from Honeycomb, like the action bar and fragments.

Communication and sharing - "Applications can integrate contacts, profile data, and calendar events from any of the user’s activities or social networks." There are new APIs for Contacts, Calendar, and Visual Voicemail.