Arctic Fox Make Android Developer’s Live Easier
As an native android app developer for at least 3 years, I always wonder what kind of beautiful applications we can build with android studio. For you who do not know what Android Studio is, it’s basically tools for us developers to build beautiful and helpful apps that released on Google Play nowadays. As of January 2021, the Google Play Store features over 3 million apps. It means that android is pretty popular platform for mobile devices.
Android Studio has accompanied me to sail in a ship of creativity for years. I developed many beautiful apps during my time as freelancer in my campus. Most of my clients are my lecturers and some college students who want to have android app in order to win government funding or even win competitions. Even though most of my app that I developed at that time was focused on the UI and did not follow any architecture or design pattern (anyway you can check my android projects here: my github).
For me personally, building an android apps are a challenge at first. Especially when you want to refactor your code or implement new features but you do not want your code break your current code. You need to have good understanding in programming principles such as SOLID principle or clean architecture for android project in order to make your project meet the minimum criteria for a high-quality project. Making sure to have all of that concept inside your head wasn’t really easy. Beside that, we need to make sure we did not do any miss typing while implementing the code. Making sure that our app run on the targeted devices is also a must. I often found my table was full of messy wires because I need to connect my phone to my computer as debuggable device. In that situation, your tools play big roles in helping you to achieve the final result.
Fortunately, Android Studio provide you with numerous helpful features to make your life as and android developers easier. Android Studio is an essentials tools to develop native android applications. It provides useful built-in tools such as debugger, layout inspector, android virtual devices (AVD) that allows you to run and test your app in virtual devices, background task inspector, database inspector, device file explorer and many other useful tools.
To always satisfy the needs of developers, Android Studio has been released on many versions over the years. The latest stable release of Android Studio also called Android Studio Arctic Fox was released on May 2021. This latest release brings to life Jetpack Compose 1.0. Jetpack Compose is Android’s new toolkit for building native UI. This release also focuses on virtual devices, including wearable devices such as smartwatch, and helps with developer productivity, with features like new Background Task Manager.
As we announced last year, we adjusted our version numbering of Android Studio to match the year and version of the IntelliJ IDEA that Android Studio is based on, plus our own patch number. We will be using code names (in alphabetical order); the first is Arctic Fox and the next is Bumblebee (currently in canary).Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) updates Android Studio to version 2020.3 of the IntelliJ platform which adds a slew of new features including debugger interactive hints, VCS updates, and several new code editor enhancements to speed up your workflow.” ~jetbrains team.
There are many enhancements to Android Studio Arctic Fox. You can check the full list of changes in Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) Beta release blog and release notes. In this post, I will only highlight some changes based on my favorites.
The first improvement that amazed me is the new Layout Inspector for Compose. By using this tools, you can get more details on your layouts and troubleshoot. The example is when you can see the parameters and modifiers passed to each composable. But this tools actually will such your memory, so I won’t recommend you to use this feature if you don’t have enough memory left.
The second tools in Arctic Fox that I think it’s very usefull is Background Task Inspector. Background task is always things we want to pay attention more when implementing background tasks into our project. It’s because unlike other component, we can’t actually see what’s going on in background task. so that’s why having a task inspector is a gamechanger. You can access it by selecting View > Tool Windows > App Inspection from the menu bar.
The last thing that I want to share to you is the ability to run multi-device tests in parallel. Most of time instrumental or unit test is a must when you implementing new UI or new function. Doing testing for your project will make sure all of your implementation runs as expected. Maybe you did not make test file when you’re developing your project alone, but when it comes to complex project with team requirements, running test is mandatory. With Multi-Device Tests, Instrumentation tests can now be run across multiple devices in parallel and investigated using the new Test Matrix tool window. Using this tool window, you can more easily determine which tests are failing across various device configurations.
There are still many improvement in Arctic Fox release other than what I mention above. I can’t mention all of them because I am currently still exploring Arctic Fox as well. I will update this post if I find other feature that I think it’s interesting and important to share to you. Until then, see you later…
