Apps JetBrain's IntellJ IDEA -- ?????

[dlflannery]

***This*** looks very promising as a free Android Devpt competitor to Eclipse. Anybody know anything about it? (I searched here -- found nothing.)

I was about to install Eclipse and the required Android components on my Win7 system, and I'm not thrilled about the complications and problems (e.g., IDE lockups) that I hear about. This IntellJ IDEA product seems like an attractive alternative, and also seems to get good reviews.

 

[miXer]

I have tried both Netbeans and eclipse, and I must say, eclipse is FAR ahead when it comes to Android programming. I have never tried IntelliJ, but i am always looking for a better IDE then eclipse. I don't like the workspace idea and I like to have ONE project loaded in the IDE at a time. The eclipse way is just messy!!

So why don't you give it a go, and post here what you think about it!

 

[russellbateman]

You just need to close the project(s) you're not working on in the workspace. And, there's nothing to keep you from limiting yourself to one project per workspace except a little time in set-up.

I actually quite like Eclipse for Android development, maybe because I've gotten used to it.

There's also Appcelerator/Titanium if what you're doing needs to go cross-platform (iPhone, BlackBerry).

 

[Sam Voss]

I'm assuming you're meaning Intellij, and yeah, I use it, so does almost our entire dev team, I highly recommend it, because IMHO it beats eclipse in every aspect, except when you're getting your handle on development, especially in xml because eclipse gives you the development tool to let you see what it looks like, but once you get good at making layouts, you can do this in your head.

I like it especially because it has such fast response when you're typing code, like it gives you its suggestions much faster than eclipse does (faster than instantly it seems )

 

[miXer]

You just need to close the project(s) you're not working on in the workspace. And, there's nothing to keep you from limiting yourself to one project per workspace except a little time in set-up.

I actually quite like Eclipse for Android development, maybe because I've gotten used to it.

There's also Appcelerator/Titanium if what you're doing needs to go cross-platform (iPhone, BlackBerry).

I do that, but i don't like it. I much more like the Netbeans way where you must close a project before you can open a new one. And you never see more than one project in the IDE at a time.

 

[pr0cs]

I use IntelliJ, I've used it commercially (not just Android development) since 2003 or so. Version 10 is really good and works well with Android development.
I just don't like Eclipse, the integration with Android development (key xml file editing for example) works really well but it's so convoluted and messy I just despise using it. So I was thrilled when Jetbrains offered native support for Android.
The download is free, try it out. They have plugins for pretty much everything now so github, svn etc all works 'out of the box'.

 

[dlflannery]

............The download is free, try it out. They have plugins for pretty much everything now so github, svn etc all works 'out of the box'.

I setup the "Community" (free version), which has the Android plugin integrated, on my Win7 64bit system. I used the 32-bit versions of the JDK and the Android SDK. Downloads and installs went smoothly. I then did the "Hello World" app from the IntelliJ web site. In general this went well, although there were a few points where reality didn't match the tutorial, perhaps because the tutorial was done for version 9(?).
Apparently I was able to guess my way through these points since the app did build and run in the Emulator -- that is on the third try. The first two times gave errors. Once past that point, running in the emulator went fine, although a little slow to get going.

So I exported the .apk using the export wizard tool. This went fine including automatically invoking the signature key wizard which sets up a local keycode store and generates a signature for you -- although again it took three repeats before this completed without error.

I don't have an Android device (yet) so emailed the .apk to a friend who has a Verizon Motorola Android. He used this handy website -- apkinstall.com -- and quickly had the app installed and running correctly.

I'm favorably impressed so far, although the two places where the exact same operations had to be attempted 3 times before they succeeded are a little troubling.

Regarding the lack of a WSIWYG gui editor, someone recommended DroidDraw for this. It generates XML that you are supposed to be able to just paste into your IntelliJ project files.

 

[dlflannery]

I've successfully done the "Currency Converter" tutorial app given on the DroidDraw website using an Android project in IntelliJ IDEA 10. I used the web version of the layout tool and also tried the stand-alone Windows program. The displayed layout on either version didn't match the tutorial. The widgets were much larger than they were in the tutorial pictorials and extended outside the relative layout box size defined in the tutorial (200x130). I couldn't get them where they needed to be in the standalone version. By fiddling around a little I got the web version to work and generated the XML text which I copied and pasted into my IntellJ IDEA java source file, with some guesswork in merging. It worked but the layout designer is pretty clunky. After I got it running in the emulator I manually tweaked the widget sizes to be a little smaller.

If anyone knows a layout designer compatible with IDEA 10 that might be a little better than DroidDraw, I would like to hear about it. Thanks.