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    ADT 14 Preview

    Note: SDK Tools r14 and ADT 14 have been released 10/19/2011.

    September 27, 2011:
    We have just released a preview build of ADT 14 and of the SDK Tools, r14. Follow the installation instructions below.

    New Features

    We've already covered many of the new features on the Recent Changes blog, but here's the full list:
    • Build system improvements
      • Library projects
      • Improved incremental builds. Resource compilation is run much less frequently. It is no longer run when strings are edited, or when layouts are edited(unless a new id is introduced), and it is no longer run once per library project.
      • Resource compilation is no longer done for normal save operations, only when running or debugging (option added in ADT 12 now on by default.)
      • There is a new "PNG crunch cache", which means image crunching is only done once, not once per build which is significant for projects with many resources
      • Incremental ant builds
      • ADT now uses bin/classes to output the java compilation and bin/ for Android specific classes. This will make bin show up in the package explorer.
    • DDMS
      • Brand new logcat view. Fixes bugs, displays and filters by application names instead of just pids, fronts when application runs.
    • SDK Manager: Revamped UI.
    • XML Editing
      • New XML formatter which formats all XML files according to the standard Android coding style. The formatter can also reorder attributes to follow the recommended order.
      • Improved "smart indent": automatic indentation and un-indentation when pressing Return in XML editors
      • Go to Matching (Ctrl-Shift-P) in XML files can now jump between opening and closing tags
      • Changes made by the layout editor are automatically run through the new XML formatter.
      • Select Enclosing Element should now work on the Mac as well.
    • Java Editing
    • Layout Editor
      • Tooltip feedback for resizing and dragging operations. For example, when dragging in a relative layout, the proposed constraints are shown, and when resizing the new dimensions are shown.
      • New "Remove Container" visual refactoring which removes the children of a container up to the top level and transfers namespace and layout attributes if necessary.
      • Improved access to properties in the context menu: The most frequently set attributes for each view are listed at the top of the menu, and the properties menu offers access to the most recently set attributes, attributes organized by their defining view, and layout attributes only or all attributes alphabetically.
      • The context menu now also contains pull-right menus for accessing properties of the parents, which is useful when the children fully cover the parent making it hard to select on its own.
      • Ability to suppress rendering fidelity warnings.
    • Asset Studio integration: Wizard creation of launcher icons, menu icons, tab icons, etc.
    • The New Project and the New XML File wizards have been reworked into multiple pages. Sample Projects are now copied into the workspace such that they can be modified and deleted without affecting themaster copy.
    • Welcome wizard to help with initial setup of the Android development environment.
    • The dependency on Eclipse GEF was removed.
    • Many bug fixes and minor improvements, and in particular some critical bug fixes on Linux

    Installation

    Installing the ADT 14 preview is a bit more work than usual because the new build system has some dependencies. Please follow these directions carefully.

    Backup

    Before we begin, please make a backup of the following:
    1. Your Eclipse workspace
    2. Your projects, if their files are not inside the workspace directory
    3. Your SDK installation's tools folder
    4. Your SDK installation's platform-tools folder
    The reason for backing up 1 and 2 is that the new build system will migrate some of your project metadata related to library projects, and it will rename some of the .properties files in your project, so if you want to go back after using ADT 14, or if there's a bug in our migration code, you'll want to have a backup. As part of the preview you're also installing preview versions of some of the SDK command line tools, so backup steps 3 and 4 allow you to go back if you need to. Note that you don't really need these last two backups since you can just delete your SDK installation directory and install everything from scratch again via the SDK manager, but a local .zip backup is going to be faster, especially if you have installed many platforms.

    Download

    (Downloads removed when tools were released 10/19/2011)
    Download
    • adt14-preview-plugins.zip (6.4 MB)
    and one of the following depending on whether you are developing on Windows, Linux or Mac OSX:
    • adt14-preview-tools-windows.zip (42 MB)
    • adt14-preview-tools-linux.zip (34 MB)
    • adt14-preview-tools-mac.zip (39 MB)
    Note: Source download is available here (9 MB).

    Updating the SDK

    ADT 14 relies on some changes to the SDK command line tools in order to for example support incremental png crunching and incremental ant builds, so first you'll need to update your SDK with the new binaries which are not yet available via the SDK Manager.

    To install them, unzip one of the adt14-preview-tools-platform.zip files, and copy its contents on top of your SDK installation directory. Note that you cannot just replace the existing SDK directory -- you have to copy its contents on top of the SDK directory since the .zip file contains only some of the SDK files.

    On Windows and Mac OSX, you can extract and copy the files using the Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder. 

    On Linux, you can use something like the following (which just unzips the contents of the preview file directly on top of the SDK directory, with the -d flag pointing to the destination SDK directory and the -o flag enabling overwriting files without prompting):

    $ unzip -o -d /your/sdk/dir ~/Downloads/adt14-preview-tools-linux.zip

    Installing the ADT plugins

    Download and unzip the adt14-preview-plugins.zip file somewhere and then start Eclipse and install the plugin in the normal way described here: http://developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html#troubleshooting. For Eclipse 3.7 this means opening the "Install New Software..." dialog from the Help menu, then pointing to the directory where you unzipped adt14-preview-plugins.zip and following the on-screen instructions.

    Migration

    When opening projects for the first time with Eclipse, for projects that reference libraries, right click project and choose "Android Tools > Fix project properties". This will not be necessary with the final version of ADT 14.


    As always, please provide feedback and bug reports (using one of the feedback channels).

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