After I’ve developed for Android for awhile, I become increasingly dissatisfied with Eclipse. Its code completion is very slow. The graphics editor, when used, often freezes the IDE. I decided to give other IDEs a try.
I first installed Intellij. It looks much better than Eclipse. However, I didn’t give it too much of a try since Android Studio seems much more promising. Anyway, I downloaded Android Studio 0.4.6 for Windows from http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html. It immediately asked me to update to version 0.5.4. I created a trial project and proceeded to compile. The first error I encountered was :Error: Gradle project refresh failed. Here’s the link to the answer that solved my problem: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21066598/android-studio-0-4-2-gradle-project-sync-failed-error. Note that there are multiple .gradle folders. The one I deleted was under /user/yvonne.
I cut and pasted some resources from my old Eclipse files. After a while, I ran into another Gradle error: “Error parsing XML: prefix must not be bound to one of the reserved namespace names”. It turns out that one of the generated xml files contained this incorrect namespace: “”. I solved this problem by deleting all namespace information from the resource files I copied. This problem is discussed in: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19526945/android-gradle-merged-values-xml-uses-wrong-namespace.
I also ran into permission problem with the Android SDK Manager. Eclipse installs SDK in any user chosen directory. However, Android Studio installs them under c:Program Files(x86)\Android\Android studio\sdk. As a result, when one runs the SDK manager from IDE, the system won’t let you install any more SDK due to lack of permission. I solved this problem by running tools\android.bat as administrator. The problem is discussed here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4771895/android-sdk-manager-not-installing-components
Android Studio is MUCH better than Eclipse. Code completion is fast. Graphic editor still freezes sometimes but not nearly as bad. I still type in major components in text than modify them using the graphic editor. The emulator is still slow. Anyway, I’m very happy that I took the time to switch IDE.