Android Studio v1.5 was recently released to the stable channel and it brings, well...exactly what developers learned to expect from it. The tool delivered nothing out of the ordinary: traditional performance enhancing processes, bug fixes and various miscellaneous tuning.
Software engineers get a lot of help from these features, without a doubt. Yet in the grander scheme, there are bigger things that committed Android developers put on their wish list.
In the video below, Reto Meier not only explains the current improvements to the Android Studio 1.5 but also teases the audience with a mysterious crate. What's in the box? It could be a theme editor that actually works flawlessly, a fresh language support or...the real additions to Android Studio 1.5.
If you write code for Android devices, one new aspect that might interest you is in the Memory Profiler. During testing, it allows you to detect which are the leaked activities. Errors from fast or careless coding are easy to spot with it. For developers who want to find out more about the benefits of fixing memory leaks, the LeakCanary library from Square is a very powerful resource. How powerful, exactly? Just trust that Google itself uses it on some of its apps and you should do, too.
Static code analysis gets a good amount of help from the capacity to do several lint checks. One is useful in particular, where the developer gets a warning if he attempts overriding resource references from the manifest. Also, editing themes in the IDE is now more visual due to previews.
"You can now use short names when doing code completion for custom views. We also make sure that Android Studio doesn't steal your focus if you switch virtual desktops during the build and run phase," Meier points out in the video.
Everyone, regardless of the channel used, will get access to version 1.5 of Android Studio.
For developers who already have Android Studio installed, downloading the updates is easy. Just go to the navigation menu (Help → Check for Update [Windows/Linux] or Android Studio → Check for Updates [OS X]). New users are able to get the stable version from the Android Studio site, where a lot of information about the software waits to be perused.
