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Android Studio Beta Released

posted Jun 27, 2014, 9:25 AM by Tor Norbye
We've just released Android Studio Beta! The build number for the first beta build is 0.8.0. And we've just released a minor update to the first beta build: 0.8.1.

NOTE: For various technical reasons we will not offer a patch upgrade from 0.6.1 to 0.8, so you'll need to download and install the full IDE instead. If you have already installed 0.8.0, you can patch update from 0.8.0 to 0.8.1.

In addition to bug fixes, the primary new features in Android Studio Beta are:
  • Support for the Android L preview SDK
    • Layout rendering: Support for the new L theme, widgets, and graphics support (such as shadow layers)
    • API version rendering (showing the layout across different UI versions)
    • Editor support for L APIs (such as the new Drawable XML tags and attributes, e.g. <ripple>, <animated-selector>, etc)
  • Support for Wear and TV
    • New templates for Android Wear and for Android TV, along with Gradle build support
    • Layout Rendering

  • New intention action to override resources
    • And lint quickfix for API check violations
  • Automatic platform component downloading during Gradle sync when a required platform is missing. For example, if your build.gradle file requires API 19, but your SDK install does not have Android 4.4 installed, you will get a fix link in the Gradle Sync window which offers to install it:
    When you click on it, you'll first get a license agreement dialog, and then it will continue to install the missing component and restart the sync. 

    This is not specific to missing Android SDK versions; it will also install missing build tools versions, or missing Android or Google Maven repositories.
  • Gradle Sync Caching. We now cache the synced Gradle model across IDE invocations, so if you exit the IDE and restart, the IDE should be ready to use much more quickly.

Note: You can see many of these new features in action in the "What's New In Android Development Tools" talk; the IDE demo starts at around 19:30.

Installation
As noted above, you cannot use the IDE update mechanism to update from a canary build to the new beta build: you will need to download the full version. You can find the download here:

Problems?
If you run into problems, be sure to check the Known Issues page which we'll update as necessary
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