Five improvements to Android Studio that will improve a developer’s life!
Android studio is currently the holy grail for developing android apps and it is a welcomed improvement over the ADT Plugin for Eclipse IDE that was deprecated in 2015. Having a dedicated IDE has made Android development more enjoyable but it still has its pit falls. Here are some simple improvements that will make a big difference in the use of Android Studio for software engineers.
Automatically Removing Un-used Imports
Even though unused imports don’t necessarily affect the compilation of your code, it adds some unnecessary overhead to the size of your binary file. Also if you happen to have style check analysis set up on your build server or your local configuration, it will cause failures.
‘Single Quotes’ characters in the String values file error
This used to drive me absolutely nuts! If you accidentally type ‘don’t’ without escaping the single quote character in this way (don\’t), you can get lost for hours without understanding how to fix it. This happens because the compiler automatically opens up the values.xml file which is an auto-generated file that looks identical to the strings.xml. You make several attempts to edit the values.xml file but it never saves and you keep rebuilding. Insane!
Fixing the issue with updating Google Play Services on Emulators
How many times have we seen the pop-up to update google play services on a device emulator and have no option to install or fix?
Keeping Sample projects up to date and reliable
This may not be as big of a deal to experienced developers, but if you are a novice, the first place you go to learn about building an android application is from the SDK samples. If you immediately get a failure on build, this is quite deterring to a new programmer.
Automatically checking the “Show Package Details” option on the SDK manager
So this was my latest frustration. It appears that Android Studio had finally done away with the option to launch the standalone SDK manager. However, the interface within android studio would appear extremely confusing to those who are used to an interface that laid out the API levels as well as all the extras including the Google API packages. You would need to check the box for Show Package details for those to become visible. This is not completely inherent to those who were accustomed to the old interface. There is no reason why that box cannot be checked by default.
I hope this helps to shed some light about things that could be done to improve the coding lives of the Android developer community.
Do you have any suggestions for improvements to Android Studio? Please comment below and share this post on twitter to the @androidstudio twitter handle. Happy coding!
