Android Studio

[szycag]

Any mobile developers around? Google recently switched over from offering an Eclipse plugin for their official SDK to a fully featured product (still free) called Android Studio. It's based off of Intellij and is supposed to be an all-in-one solution, i.e. it has a Nexus 5 emulated that you can run your stuff on right there in the package. I have 4 gigs of RAM and it still doesn't feel like enough to run the IDE that well.

I'm nearly done with my CS Associate's degree at a community college, but I still don't feel like a programmer just because I know some SQL, know the basics of C++, etc. So I wanted to start an Android project and teach myself mainly. But I've been getting so discouraged with Android Studio. It's been closing itself for weird reasons, like I went into the properties of some text in the XML and suddenly everything in front of me just disappears. I heard friends at school talk about the beta version being unreliable, and it looks like just because it's 1.0 none of that has changed. On top of that I've spent a lot more time with C++ than Java and I'm just getting overwhelmed trying to figure the nuances out.

Have any of you experienced Android Studio? Are you sticking with the Eclipse plugin for now? Or is it a lot more functional for your needs?

I had some ideas for a Madlib program that I wanted to begin to code. I might just do some interim parts of some of the logic I was thinking of in plain old Java now, then try to implement them in Android when I feel more comfortable. The odds seem stacked in my favor for this project, since I don't think many of the Madlib programs on the Play Store are presented that well.

[Vexorg]

I don't know how helpful this will be since I'm not a developer, but I do use the Android tools on a regular basis for testing purposes (so mostly ADB/DDMS logging.) From a UI perspective Android Studio looks better, but to me it seems like even in the final release it lacks functionality for things I do regularly using the Eclipse based stuff. Not sure how well it works on the development side though.