Just a short post today, outlining some cool stuff I’ve found for Android development.

IntelliJ IDEA

Google have very kindly put together the ADT for Eclipse, which consists of plugins and layout managers to make development a bit smoother. Which would be great for me, if using Eclipse didn’t make me want to pull my nails out with forceps (I’m a Visual Studio person by day). I dislike Eclipse so much, that I spent most of the last project building in TextMate and looking up API references by hand. The very nice people who make my most favourite Visual Studio plugin in the whole WORLD – Resharper, also make a very nice Java IDE called IntelliJ IDEA. Version 8 came with some basic plugins you could download for Android development, but the very nice people at Jetbrains have put some serious time into the Android tools for Version 9 of IntelliJ. Inbuilt Logcat support, and a run/deploy model which beats the socks off the Eclipse one. I believe there’s debugging support as well – I’ve not been able to test that yet though. All in all, a very nice environment. Oh, and most of the refactoring code navigation tools that make Resharper so awesome in the first place. Check out version 9 BETA.

DroidDraw Beta

DroidDraw is a cross-browser UI designer and editor for Android applications. I’ve not had a proper play around with it yet, I’ve just been using it for a few days, but so far it is officially awesome. Much more reliable than the in built Eclipse editor, and nowhere near as frustrating. I’ll be honest, now I’ve got the very, very good XML support which IntelliJ provides, I’m not needing it so much, but it makes a great prototyping tool.

Linky Linky Linky

Some articles which have been useful over the past few days:

How to use AlertDialog.Builder in Android applications Great quick reference to AlertDialog.Builder.

What’s Your Preference: Part One Writing preferences should be easy. _Don’t do my trick and write a load of custom layouts, only to realise the API does 90% of the work for you

What’s Your Preference: Part Two more of the above

Android 1.5 android.R.drawable Icon Resources The API contains a load of built in graphics you can just reference.