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Android Studio 2.2

android-developers.blogspot.com

41–50 of 81 posts

Re: Android Studio 2.2

#41
post #21
post #5

You need a pretty powerful machine to run Android Studio. It lags when I run it on my laptop with an i5 and 6 GB ram. I wonder if upgrading to a SSD will increase performance.

I spend about 80% of my day in Android Studio and It's definitely resource hungry. On my brand new MBP 13" with 16GB RAM and an i7 processor it can still make the whole thing stutter when compiling a medium to large project. At work my desktop can handle it, but that thing has pretty unrealistic specs.

It is not the IDE per se (300 MB RSS or so), but Java allocating some 2 GB heap per process, which also includes gradle daemon and compilers.

This can easily eat a bunch of ram, making the OS swap. Seems OS X has extra bad policy of swapping.

Re: Android Studio 2.2

#42
post #2

I've dabbled in Android dev, but have always lagged due to not really liking Java. Android Studio was a pleasant experience for me when I tried it this year, and now that C/C++ NDK support is better in this release I am going to give it another go. I almost feel like I should just go completely Android given the numbers of devices out there is overwhelming compared with Windows/iOS/OS X combined. I will keep up with…

Have you tried Kotlin ?

It does a really good job at fixing java's issues and since it outputs bytecode, you can write entire Android apps with it without writing a single line of java.

Re: Android Studio 2.2

#43
post #32
post #2

I've dabbled in Android dev, but have always lagged due to not really liking Java. Android Studio was a pleasant experience for me when I tried it this year, and now that C/C++ NDK support is better in this release I am going to give it another go. I almost feel like I should just go completely Android given the numbers of devices out there is overwhelming compared with Windows/iOS/OS X combined. I will keep up with…

Just be aware that C and C++ are really meant for programming games, bringing code from other platforms or improve performance. Trying to write an app that isn't a game will make you enjoy the pleasures of JNI calls, given the APIs exposed to the NDK.

I know, since my first attempt was in Java to create a simple app. I know the NDK can be used to create OpenGLES guis, and access the sensors, but for a traditional app it's a lot of work.

Syntax is a subjective thing; I just don't like Java. I was hoping Google was going to come up with something (other than Go), for Android.

I have tried a lot of the work arounds, and simply put, Java is the way to do Android right, so I guess I need to get over it!

Re: Android Studio 2.2

#44
post #2

I've dabbled in Android dev, but have always lagged due to not really liking Java. Android Studio was a pleasant experience for me when I tried it this year, and now that C/C++ NDK support is better in this release I am going to give it another go. I almost feel like I should just go completely Android given the numbers of devices out there is overwhelming compared with Windows/iOS/OS X combined. I will keep up with…

Have you tried Kotlin ? It does a really good job at fixing java's issues and since it outputs bytecode, you can write entire Android apps with it without writing a single line of java.

Not in a year, but it wasn't different enough to me - less verbose, but the same when I long for a Lisp or ML or Haskell for Android! Scala was a thought. And I am now looking at F# again with the recent OS works by MS and the Xamarin situation.

As I wrote downstream, I just need to commit to Java (or Kotlin!) I think!

Re: Android Studio 2.2

#45
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things are much more sane and well thought out than iOS. Styling and layouts, for example, are so much better than Interface Builder, which is pretty much just a toy for demos. Other things like the way events are handled and some of the native widgets are clunky. Some of us are fed up enough with all the incidental complexity Apple puts in your way every day as a developer (provisioning, in particular), that we…

IB is perfectly fine for most apps. When you feel constricted it is easy enough to accomplish what you want in code.

What happens if you try to open an iPhone app on an iPad? What happens if you try to open an Android phone app on an Android tablet?

That's the difference between IB and Android's layout system.

Re: Android Studio 2.2

#46
post #34
post #3

I tried many times to get into android development but everytime I get put off by the complexity of the api. The amount of digging in documentation you need to do in order to implement the simplest functionality scares me. Is anyone else feeling the same way? And does anyone know if it gets better with time or is it a constant struggle?

... and than you need to do the same thing for iOS, which is a totally different eco-system. I've been using the known multi-platform tools for a few years now, like Cordova and Haxe+OpenFL. Haven't typed a line of Java since...

That works if you can throw the performance down the drain. I had to develop an interface to do a real time display of a hardware component. No chance, the Cordova API is completely unusable. Maybe if somebody wrote a native plugin interface like Electron has it would become usable.

Re: Android Studio 2.2

#47
post #2

I've dabbled in Android dev, but have always lagged due to not really liking Java. Android Studio was a pleasant experience for me when I tried it this year, and now that C/C++ NDK support is better in this release I am going to give it another go. I almost feel like I should just go completely Android given the numbers of devices out there is overwhelming compared with Windows/iOS/OS X combined. I will keep up with…

If you still don't like it, give Xamarin a shot (yeah I'm kind of pushing Xamarin here just because I couldn't believe how great it was).

See my replies above, but yes, I am a fan of F#, and I wish it were that easy, but I think simply learning Java (or Kotlin as pointed out above) might be the best way in the end. Google has made it very clear they are not working on an alternative from Java dev in Android.

Re: Android Studio 2.2

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I misread thinking he said iOSs XML system and not Androids. Original comment below. ----- > .. View XML abstraction is not that far off from HTML/CSS. Do you mean the underlying structure of xibs and storyboards? I don't think this is something anyone looks at willingly, much less actually work with.

I think the parent is talking about android views. which are XML documents and almost everyone writes the XML instead of mucking about with the visual editor.

I think this is mostly due to the lacking visual editor rather than virtues of the underlying XML format.

Re: Android Studio 2.2

#49
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IB is perfectly fine for most apps. When you feel constricted it is easy enough to accomplish what you want in code.

What happens if you try to open an iPhone app on an iPad? What happens if you try to open an Android phone app on an Android tablet? That's the difference between IB and Android's layout system.

It's really not – I think you're working with outdated knowledge from several years ago. An "iPhone app" is one specifically built for iPhones. That's not the norm these days. Normally you would build an iOS app with universal storyboards that would work for both iPhones and iPads. Normally opening an iOS application on an iPad would result in a layout that works well for iPads.

Re: Android Studio 2.2

#50
post #5

You need a pretty powerful machine to run Android Studio. It lags when I run it on my laptop with an i5 and 6 GB ram. I wonder if upgrading to a SSD will increase performance.

It runs perfectly well on a current MacBook (12"). Which is the least performant Mac(Book) AFAIK.
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