Chapter 3 IDE: A quick overview of Android Studio
Android Studio is an IDE officially provided by Google. It is developed based on IntelliJ IDEA and is used to replace Eclipse. However, it is currently an early version. The current version is 0.4.2, which is released every three months. The latest version was released in January 2014.
Android Studio includes all the tools needed to develop Android apps, but it is not mature, so if you need stability, it is recommended to use Eclipse. However, Android Studio has brought us many new features, let us take a look at this exciting future star.
Install
You can download the corresponding version from the Android developer official website.
create project
Open Android Studio (hereinafter abbreviated as AS), there are some options on the welcome interface, select New Project.
You can see that the creation interface is very similar to Eclipse. You can select the default for everything and click Next.
Next step along the way, these are very similar to Eclipse.
After the creation wizard is completed, AS will create an AndroidStudioProjects folder, where all Android project files are located.
development environment
When the project creation is completed, AS will open the Activity for editing by default, and also open a virtual device interface to display the application on it.
In Eclipse we will have a package explorer (Package Explorer), and there is a similar interface in AS, but it is not displayed by default. You can double-click the project name to open it.
In the layout interface you can see the component tree and the visual interface at the same time.
One difference between AS and Eclipse is that the files you need to operate in AS are basically under the src directory, because AS is based on Gradle, but this does not affect your ability to switch between the two IDEs.
Project interaction
One advantage of AS is that many of its tools have buttons for direct use, such as AVD Manager, SDK Manager, debugging tools, etc.
Like Eclipse, AS also provides many views for interacting with projects. Among them, you will find a view called "Android" very useful. It provides information about virtual and real devices, as well as information output by Logcat.
Summarize
This article briefly introduces the interface of Android Studio, but it includes more useful features to make development easier. This is because it is specifically designed for developing Android applications, unlike Eclipse which needs to support more development scenarios. After you get used to Eclipse, maybe you will try using Android Studio.
Now that our development environment is ready, we will take a look at the structure of the Android app in the next chapter.