The early access preview (http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html) is definitely prettier than Eclipse. Not that that's a high bar to clear. It also seems to be less stable, which is a high bar to clear. ;)
Yeah, I know, pre-release software.
The windows seem to take a long time to load, too. That strikes me as odd -- it's one thing when you're starting up some sort of interpreter, but several seconds to scan the project directory or open a file? Perhaps that's another pre-release issue.
The layout XML editor looks like a big win, though. The syntax awareness, suggestions, documentation access, formatting and just all around general helpfulness seem to be about 1000x better than Eclipse. That alone would make it worth the switch! I think the biggest time sink for me while working on layouts is remembering "what's the darn attribute for..." It's all right there in glorious detail.
The realtime WYSIWYG view is . . . cool, I guess. ADT already had that, though you had to switch to a different tab for it. Maybe I'm missing something; it doesn't seem that revolutionary to me. It still doesn't handle custom views, which I use a lot of. (And I mean a lot! Custom container views, too.) And I don't really like feedback while typing, anyway. YMMV, of course, but it looks to me like the big win is the text editor itself, not the graphical display.
I've been meaning to get off of Eclipse for a while now, so I'll play with it more and watch how it changes. For now, color me experimental and cautiously optimistic.
Every time I open eclipse I feel like crying. Is just that awful (usability-wise).
On my search to replace Eclipse for my android development I think I came across IntelliJ and it was very resources-heavy compared to eclipse which in the end made me give up on it. Let's hope it's more efficient now...
Make sure you disable any plugins you don't need for IntelliJ Idea otherwise it will just load every plugin for doing almost everything under the sun which can make it a bit bloated.
I feel the same way. For school, we are - unfortunately - more or less forced to use Eclipse. I understand that many companies' standard IDE is Eclipse, which means that being comfortable with it makes students more hirable. However, I was already comfortable with Xcode when I began to learn all about Eclipse's archaic features. The jump from IDEs has been tough. Now of course, Eclipse does a hell of a job and it's been a big player for ages, but it isn't pretty. Maybe I am too picky, but I want to developed well-designed apps in a well-designed environment.
The long loading time might be unoptimized-yet parsing of various XML files of ones app. In general, it's mostly an evolutionary work on existing IntelliJ Android plugin.
The View editor afaik has some support for custom views, but only some - it's rather iffy (IntelliJ Android view renderer simply used Android libs to render them, but of course that doesn't work for everything, and anything fully programmatic is dead anyway). Fwiw, IntelliJ's XML editor was always much better at not freaking out at the fact that you haven't finished writing that new tag so of course your view doesn't validate (something that was a constant for me back when I used Eclipse).
The editors in general are standard for IntelliJ, with some nifty transformations added - the XML string example reminds me of how IntelliJ dynamically renders certain idioms into Java 8 forms while still keeping the code in 1.6 (well, that's how I have it configured, that is).
In general, it's nice, I hope it will be available as plugin into plain old IntelliJ as well.
In Eclipse you can use View.isInEditMode to hide code that doesn't work in the preview. Bit of extra work but probably worth it, having your custom views work in the layout editor can be a timesaver. I'd imagine that works in Android Studio too.
Yeah, I know, pre-release software.
The windows seem to take a long time to load, too. That strikes me as odd -- it's one thing when you're starting up some sort of interpreter, but several seconds to scan the project directory or open a file? Perhaps that's another pre-release issue.
The layout XML editor looks like a big win, though. The syntax awareness, suggestions, documentation access, formatting and just all around general helpfulness seem to be about 1000x better than Eclipse. That alone would make it worth the switch! I think the biggest time sink for me while working on layouts is remembering "what's the darn attribute for..." It's all right there in glorious detail.
The realtime WYSIWYG view is . . . cool, I guess. ADT already had that, though you had to switch to a different tab for it. Maybe I'm missing something; it doesn't seem that revolutionary to me. It still doesn't handle custom views, which I use a lot of. (And I mean a lot! Custom container views, too.) And I don't really like feedback while typing, anyway. YMMV, of course, but it looks to me like the big win is the text editor itself, not the graphical display.
I've been meaning to get off of Eclipse for a while now, so I'll play with it more and watch how it changes. For now, color me experimental and cautiously optimistic.