Android Studio 2.3 Update Little notes

The IDE, which is officially published and maintained by Google, is a development tool that is beloved and used by millions of Android developers around the world, and Android Studio, which officially ushered in 2.3 stable updates on March 2 of the previous few days. As an Android fan, come and join me to see what changes the new Android Studio has brought to us.

Compiler-related instant Run improvements and UI changes

Instant Run basically solves the problem of slow compilation of small-to-medium projects. As a feature of Google's focus, the Android Studio 2.3 version was optimized again on the original basis, further reducing the time to install replacement code. At the same time, the run and instant run buttons are displayed separately in the navigation bar of Android Studio for developers to choose to debug the policy.

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Build Cache

The compiled cache is a feature introduced in the Android Studio 2.2 release that caches the imported AAR and Libray in the project, speeding up compilation time during debugging. The new version is further optimized on this basis, and this feature is turned on by default and is turned off by default on version 2.2.

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Designing links and scales in related constraint layouts

Constraint layout (constrained layouts) presumably everyone has heard of, but do not know whether to use the habit, currently I have not been formally used in the project. However, Google's official approach to this layout is particularly important, this is not the new version of Android Studio to improve. Introduce the improvement point, first recommend a "Guo Lin" for the constraints of the layout of the introduction, very detailed: the introduction of new features of Android, Constraintlayout fully resolved. After reading it, make sure you will be tempted.

Version 2.3 of Android Studio supports the use of links (Chains) and scales (Ratios) in constrained layouts. The concept of Chains is roughly that, in layout with constrained layouts, we can link multiple controls together to set constraints, such as:

The concept of Ratios is also better understood, look at the words:

Both Chains and Ratios support dynamic settings, and the corresponding Constraintset APIs are available.

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Layout Control Panel

If you often design layouts in the form of a drag-and-drop control, this update point is a bit more of a benefit to you. The new Widget Palette provides search, sorting, and filtering capabilities to help us find the controls we need. Also, provide a UI preview of the corresponding control before you choose to drag and drop.

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Bookmark Common Properties

In layout design mode, we can save common attributes in the properties panel, which will then appear in the Favorites area, helping us to use them quickly.

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Support WebP

The WebP lossless compression format reduces file size by 25% compared to PNG format images. In the Android Studio 2.3 version, we are free to convert the image format, PNG to WebP, or WebP to PNG, and you can also adjust the file size by controlling the quality.

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Material Icon Gallery

The new Material icon Vector Gallery supports search filtering and sets the appropriate Label for each icon for searching. A very user-friendly improvement:

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Development of relevant lint baselines

Android Lint is an essential tool for optimizing projects that you may encounter in the use of this problem. Prior to this, each time the Lint command was executed, the tool would automatically traverse through all the target files and enumerate the non-conforming issues, and then we would deal with them one by one. But if you don't finish it, you'll have to start from the beginning to solve the problem again, and the old and new problems Lint together. At this point, if you only want to deal with new problems, there is no trace to find. The advent of the baseline (BaseLine) can solve your immediate problems. Set a BaseLine for each execution Lint, so that you only want to solve the idea of a new issues possible.

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APP Links Assistant

At the 2015 I/O Conference, Google officially announced the Android M system support App link to create an association channel between the Web URL and the native app. For example, clicking the URL link in a text message and a URL in your browser will open the app that supports app Links, a great design. To do this, you need to add the appropriate settings to the project, modify the Manifest file, and so on. The new version development tool provides a visual tool to help us with these settings, such as:

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Template updates

Starting with the Android Studio 2.3 release, all templates used when creating a new project use Constraintlayout by default, and until then, the default is Relativelayout. This, again, illustrates the importance of constraining the layout. At the same time, the new version also adds a template for the bottom navigation mode, the default implementation of the Material design in the Bottom Navigation, design details Reference: guideline.

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IntelliJ Platform Update

The Android Studio 2.3 version uses IntelliJ 2016.2 release, which has been improved on some of the IDE's update windows and notification systems.

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Test the relevant Android simulator copy and paste function

In response to the needs of the vast number of developers, Google in the new version of the simulator (v25.3.1) to achieve the PC host and emulator of the mutual copy and paste function, mainly through the sharing clipboard implementation. Note that the Copy & Paste feature works only in the x86 Google API Emulator while API level (Android 4.4-kitkat) and later versions. Effect

Android Emulator command line tool

Starting with the Android SDK tools 25.3, the emulator files in the SDK Tools folder are transferred to a standalone emulator folder, and the commands used in the past android avd are discarded and replaced. If you used a script file about this in the past, you need to make a slight change in the directory path. Of course, if you launch the emulator using Android Studio, it won't be affected.

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This is the end of the update for the Android Studio 2.3 release. If you have access to English, you can also bring your own ladder and check [Android developers Blog].

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Android Studio 2.3 Update Little notes