Welcome to Part 6 of this review of the Pluralsight course Android for .NET Developers: 1 Getting Started by Jim Wilson
Jim has over 30 years of software engineering experience, with the past 15 years heavily focused on creating mobile device and location-based solutions. He has co-founded multiple software-related startups and has served in a consulting role at several more.
After nearly a decade as a Microsoft Device Application Development MVP, Jim now focuses on developing Android and iOS device applications. Jim’s passion is mentoring software developers. He blogs at hedgehogjim.wordpress.com.
Also in this series:
Part 1 – Series Overview
Part 2 – Setting up your environment
Part 3 – Android Toolset Fundamentals
Part 4 – Dalvik Debug Monitor Server
Part 5 – Understanding Android Projects
Part 6 – Android Studio
Part 7 – Understanding Android Versioning
Android Studio
The Role of Android Studio
In the early days of Android, Eclipse was the IDE endorsed by Google. But it wasn’t the only IDE.
For most of the life of Android, JetBrains offered IntelliJ IDEA, and offered both a free “Community Edition” and a premium “Pro Edition”.
Android Studio is built on JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA.
When Jim recorded this module of the course Android Studio was only at Version 0.1, but today it is clearly the best IDE for Android development.
We see the Android tool architecture diagram again. We see that unlike Eclipse, DDMS is not inside of Android Studio. However we can still launch DDMS directly from Android Studio.
Installing Android Studio
There’s no need to watch this clip anymore because everything you need to know to install it is found here.
Using Android Studio
Jim opens Android Studio, and creates a new project.
It’s very similar to Eclipse. We can use the clip art for creating our image icons or create an image out of text.
There’s no concept of a workspace in Android Studio. Workspace is an Eclipse specific concept.
In Android Studio we just work with projects, so it’s more like working with Visual Studio.
Jim also introduces Gradle as an enterprise-level build system. It allows us to managed very complex builds.
We get a flying tour of many different screens in Android Studio. But remember this is only version 0.1 of Android Studio and many things have changed since then.
For a more comprehensive look at Android Studio see Larry Schiefer’s course Exploring Android Studio.
Setting the Darcula theme
The default look is black text on a white background. Many developers (including myself) prefer a dark theme.
Jim shows us that this is easy to setup. Just click Settings->Appearance->Theme dropdown and choose Darcula.
Zombie Code Kill 