ADT Plugin for Eclipse

Dependencies:

• Eclipse Helios (Version 3.6) or higher is required for ADT 16.0.0.
• ADT 16.0.0 is designed for use with SDK Tools r16. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r16 into your SDK, use the Android SDK Manager to do so.

General improvements:

• Added Lint tool to detect common errors in Android projects. (more info)

Dependencies:

ADT 15.0.1 is designed for use with SDK Tools r15. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r15 into your SDK, use the Android SDK Manager to do so.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed how source files are attached to library project .jar files.
• Fixed how the bin/ folder for library projects are refreshed. This ensures that parent projects pick up changes in library projects.
• Fixed how a parent project's library container is updated when a library project is recompiled. This ensures that parent projects are recompiled when code in a library project changes.
• Fixed how res/ folders are checked in library projects. This ensures that all res folders are properly included even if Eclipse is not aware of them due to refresh issues.
• Fixed issue that prevented aapt from running when editing certain XML files.
• Fixed minor XML formatting issues.

Dependencies:

ADT 15.0.0 is designed for use with SDK Tools r15. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r15 into your SDK, use the Android SDK Manager to do so.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed build issue when using Renderscript in projects that target API levels 11-13 (Issue 21006).
• Fixed issue when creating projects from existing source code.
• Fixed issues in the SDK Manager (Issue 20939, Issue 20607).
• Fixed scrolling issue in the new Logcat panel of DDMS.

Dependencies:

ADT 14.0.0 is designed for use with SDK Tools r14. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r14 into your SDK, use the Android SDK Manager to do so.

Build system:

• Changed default.properties to project.properties and build.properties to ant.properties. ADT automatically renames these files, if necessary, when you open a project in Eclipse.
• Changed how library projects are built in Eclipse.
• Changed output of javac from bin/ to bin/classes in Eclipse.
• Improved incremental builds so that resource compilation runs less frequently. Builds no longer run when you edit strings or layouts (unless you add a new id) and no longer run once for each library project.
• Introduced a "PNG crunch cache" that only runs on modified PNG files, instead of crunching all existing PNG files, all the time.
• Modified resource compilation so it no longer happens for normal save operations. It only happens when running or debugging (the build option that lets you disable the packaging step, which was introduced in ADT 12, is now on by default.)

For a complete overview of the build system changes and what you need to do to support them, see the Android Tools Project site.

General improvements:

• Added a Welcome Wizard to help with the initial setup of the Android development environment (more info).
• Integrated the Android Asset Studio, which helps you create icons for things like the launcher, menus, and tabs. (more info).
• Revamped the Logcat view and added support to display and filter logs by application names as well as PIDs (more info).
• Revamped the SDK Manager UI (more info).
• Revamped the New Project and the New XML File wizards to have multiple pages. Sample projects are now copied into the workspace such that they can be modified and deleted without affecting the master copy (more info).
• Removed the dependency on Eclipse GEF.

XML and Java editors:

• Added a new XML formatter that formats all XML files according to the standard Android coding style. The formatter can also reorder attributes to follow a recommended order and processes any changes made in the Layout editor. (more info).
• Added the "Go to Matching" (Ctrl-Shift-P) feature, which lets you jump between opening and closing tags in XML files.
• Added support for the "Select Enclosing Element" feature on Mac.
• Added a Quickfix for extracting Strings when the caret is inside a String (see more).
• Improved "smart indent", which allows automatic indentation and un-indentation when pressing the Return key in XML editors (more info).

Layout editor:

• Added tooltip feedback for dragging and resizing operations. For example, when dragging in a relative layout, the proposed constraints are shown. When resizing, the new dimensions are shown (more info).
• Added the ability to suppress rendering fidelity warnings (more info).
• Added "Remove Container" visual refactoring that removes the children of a container up to the top level and transfers namespace and layout attributes if necessary (more info).
• Added pull-right menus to the context menu for accessing properties of the parents, which is useful when the children fully cover the parent and make it hard to select on their own.
• Improved access to properties in the context menu. The most frequently set attributes for each view are listed at the top of the menu. The Properties menu offers access to the most recently set attributes, attributes organized by their defining view, and layout attributes only or all attributes alphabetically (more info).

Bug fixes:

Fixed many bugs and added minor improvements, in particular some critical bug fixes on Linux.

Dependencies:

ADT 12.0.0 is designed for use with SDK Tools r12. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r12 into your SDK, use the Android SDK and AVD Manager to do so.

Visual Layout Editor:

• New RelativeLayout drop support with guideline suggestions for attachments and cycle prevention (more info).
• Resize support in most layouts along with guideline snapping to the sizes dictated by wrap_content and match_parent. In LinearLayout, sizes are mapped to weights instead of pixel widths. (more info).
• Previews of drawables and colors in the resource chooser dialogs (more info).
• Improved error messages and links for rendering errors including detection of misspelled class names (more info).

Build system:

• A new option lets you disable the packaging step in the automatic builders. This improves performance when saving files by not performing a full build, which can take a long time for large projects. If the option is enabled, the APK is packaged when the application is deployed to a device or emulator or when the release APK is exported (more info).

Bug fixes:

Many bug fixes are part of this release (more info).

Dependencies:

ADT 11.0.0 is designed for use with SDK Tools r11. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r11 into your SDK, use the Android SDK and AVD Manager to do so.

Visual Refactoring:

• "Extract Style" feature pulls out style-related attributes from your layout and extracts them as a new style defined in styles.xml (more info).
• "Wrap in Container" feature lets you select a group of views then surround them in a new layout (a new view group, such as a LinearLayout), and transfers namespace and layout parameters to the new parent (more info).
• "Change Layout" feature changes layouts from one type to another, and can also flatten a layout hierarchy (more info).
• "Change Widget Type" feature changes the type of the selected views to a new type. Also, a new selection context menu in the visual layout editor makes it easy to select siblings as well as views anywhere in the layout that have the same type (more info).
• "Extract as Include" feature finds identical collections of views in other layouts and offers to combine them into a single layout that you can then include in each layout (more info).
• Quick Assistant in Eclipse can be invoked from the XML editor (with Ctrl-1) to apply any of the above refactorings (and Extract String) to the current selection (more info).

Visual Layout Editor:

• This is the update to the layout editor you've been waiting for! It includes (almost) all the goodies demonstrated at Google I/O. Watch the video on YouTube.
• The palette now supports different configurations for supported widgets. That is, a single view is presented in various different configurations that you can drag into your layout. For example, there is a Text Fields palette category where you can drag an EditText widget in as a password field, an e-mail field, a phone field, or other types of text boxes. Similarly, TextView widgets are preconfigured with large, normal and small theme sizes, and LinearLayout elements are preconfigured in horizontal and vertical configurations (more info).
• The palette supports custom views. You can pick up any custom implementations of the View class you've created in your project or from included libraries and drag them into your layout (more info).
• Fragments are available in the palette for placement in your layout. In the tool, you can choose which layout to show rendered for a given fragment tag. Go to declaration works for fragment classes (more info).
• The layout editor automatically applies a "zoom to fit" for newly opened files as well as on device size and orientation changes to ensure that large layouts are always fully visible unless you manually zoom in.
• You can drop in an <include> element from the palette, which will pop up a layout chooser. When you select the layout to include, it is added with an <include>. Similarly, dropping images or image buttons will pop up image resource choosers (more info).
• The configuration chooser now applies the "Render Target" and "Locale" settings project wide, making it trivial to check the layouts for different languages or render targets without having to configure these individually for each layout.
• The layout editor is smarter about picking a default theme to render a layout with, consulting factors like theme registrations in the manifest, the SDK version, and other factors.
• The layout editor is smarter about picking a default configuration to render a layout with, defaulting to the currently visible configuration in the previous file. It also considers the SDK target to determine whether to default to a tablet or phone screen size.
• Basic focus support. The first text field dropped in a layout is assigned focus, and there are Request Focus and Clear Focus context menu items on text fields to change the focus.

XML editors:

• Code completion has been significantly improved. It now works with <style> elements, completes dimensional units, sorts resource paths in values based on the attribute name, and more. There are also many fixes to handle text replacement (more info).
• AAPT errors are handled better. They are now underlined for the relevant range in the editor, and a new quickfix makes it trivial to create missing resources.
• Code completion for drawable, animation and color XML files (more info).

DDMS:

• "New Folder" action in the File Explorer.
• The screenshot dialog will add timestamps to the filenames and preserve the orientation on snapshot refresh.

General notes:

• TraceView supports zooming with the mouse-wheel in the timeline.
• The New Android Project wizard now supports Eclipse working sets.

More information about tool changes are available on the Android Tools Project Site.

Dependencies:

ADT 10.0.1 is designed for use with SDK Tools r10. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r10 into your SDK, use the Android SDK and AVD Manager to do so.

General notes:

• Temporary work-around to resolve the rare cases in which the layout editor will not open.
• Fix issue in which ADT 10.0.0 would install on Eclipse 3.4 and lower, even though ADT requires Eclipse 3.5 or higher (as of 10.0.0).

Dependencies:

ADT 10.0.0 is designed for use with SDK Tools r10. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r10 into your SDK, use the Android SDK and AVD Manager to do so.

General notes:

• The tools now automatically generate Java Programming Language source files (in the gen/ directory) and bytecode (in the res/raw/ directory) from your .rs files.
• A Binary XML editor has been added (details).
• Traceview is now integrated into the Eclipse UI (details).
• The "Go To Declaration" feature for XML and .java files quickly show all the matches in the project and allows you jump to specific items such as string translations or onClick handlers (details).
• The Resource Chooser can create items such as dimensions, integers, ids, and booleans (details).
• Improvements to the Visual Layout Editor:
  • A new Palette with categories and rendering previews (details).
  • A Layout Actions bar that provides quick access to common layout operations (details).
  • When the Android 3.0 rendering library is selected, layouts render more like they do on devices. This includes rendering of status and title bars to more accurately reflect the actual screen space available to applications (details).
  • Zoom improvements such as fit to view, persistent scale, and keyboard access. (details).
  • Further improvements to <merge> layouts, as well as layouts with gesture overlays (details).
  • Improved rendering error diagnostics.

Dependencies:

ADT 9.0.0 is designed for use with SDK Tools r9. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r9 into your SDK, use the Android SDK and AVD Manager to do so.

General notes:

• "Go To Declaration" hyperlink support: You can jump directly from code references (such as R.id.main) to the corresponding XML declaration, or from XML attributes (such as @string) to the corresponding resource definition, or from manifest XML registrations to activities and services.
• Improvements were made to name refactoring.
• AVDs now automatically save their state, so they can restart almost instantly. You can enable this feature when creating an AVD or by editing an AVD with the AVD Manager.
• Improvements to the Visual Layout Editor:
  • Support for rendering targets: You can now choose an arbitrary Android platform to render the current page, regardless of the project's minimum platform. This makes it easy to verify the layout and appearance of your activity on different versions of the platform.
  • Improved support for empty and nested layouts: Dragging items over nested and invisible layouts automatically enlarges and highlights these layouts, so that they can receive drops.
  • XML formatting improvements: The editor generates cleaner XML and you can now enable XML auto-formatting in the Preferences menu.
  • Improved Outline labels: The Outline tab now displays additional information about each View. Textual Views display a snippet of the actual text. Views with a source (such as ImageView) displays the resource name. Included Views display the name of the View.
  • When you right click a View in the Layout Editor, the context menu now contains Edit ID... and Edit Text... items. The Properties... context menus now list all of the properties and provide a way to edit them (Details).
  • The layout editor now properly handles <include> and <merge> tags (Details).
  • "Extract as Include" refactoring: The Layout Editor has a new refactoring that allows you to select one or more views in a layout, and extract it into a separate layout (Details).
  • Improved diagnostics for class loading and rendering errors: Class loading and rendering error messages are more useful and provide better information about the root cause of the error.
  • Improved error handling to prevent drag and reordering operations from adding children into an AdapterView.
  • Outline reordering: Reordering your views in the Outline tab is much easier (Details).
  • Fix for keybinding bug where keyboard shortcuts did not work (Issues 13231 and 13134).
  • Fix for problems with Custom layout attribute menu (Issue 13134).
  • Automatic configuration for various view types: Certain views have properties configured by default. For example, the width of an EditText object is set to match_parent when added to a vertical LinearLayout or a default image is added to an ImageButton.
  • Previews during dragging: Dragging from the palette or dragging within the layout editor now shows live previews of the dragged item.
  • Navigation improvements: In the Layout Editor, double-clicking Views jumps to the corresponding XML element. In the Outline view, double-clicking opens the Properties view.
  • The editor has Honeycomb style animation preview support.
  • Improved rendering support for various Views (such as TabHosts and SlidingDrawers) in Honeycomb (Issues 3162 and 13092).
  • Included layouts can be rendered and edited in the context of the layouts that include them. From a layout using an <include> tag, double-clicking on the <include> element edits the referenced layout in the context of the current layout. Additionally, when editing a layout that is included by other layouts, you can quickly change between context layouts, by right clicking in the editor and choosing Show included in.... This feature is only available in Honeycomb.
• This release fixes many other bugs, but the most important ones are listed below:
  • Fixed issue that prevented launching debug builds on productions devices when debuggable=true was not set in the Android manifest.
  • The LogCat view in DDMS properly handles UTF-8 characters.
  • The SDK Manager is more reliable on Windows (Details).
  • A JUnit initialization bug that prevented you from working with JUnit tests was fixed (Issue 12411).

Dependencies:

ADT 8.0.1 is designed for use with SDK Tools r8. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r8 into your SDK, use the Android SDK and AVD Manager to do so.

General notes:

• This is a quick follow-up to ADT 8.0.0 to fix some bugs.
• Fixes an issue in which projects failed to compile, citing a dex error.
• Better ProGuard error reporting when exporting applications for release.

Also see the recent release notes for 8.0.0, below.

Dependencies:

ADT 8.0.0 is designed for use with SDK Tools r8. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r8 into your SDK, use the Android SDK and AVD Manager to do so.

General notes:

• New version number scheme that follows the SDK Tools revision number. The major version number for your ADT plugin should now always match the revision number of your SDK Tools. For example, ADT 8.x is for SDK Tools r8.
• Support for true debug build. You no longer need to change the value of the debuggable attribute in the Android Manifest.

  Incremental builds automatically insert debuggable="true", but if you perform "export signed/unsigned application package", ADT does not insert it. If you manually set debuggable="true" in the manifest file, then release builds will actually create a debug build (it does not remove it if you placed it there).

• Automatic ProGuard support in release builds. For it to work, you need to have a proguard.config property in the default.properties file that points to a ProGuard config file.
• Completely rewritten Visual Layout Editor. (This is still a work in progress.) Now includes:
  • Full drag and drop from palette to layout for all Layout classes.
  • Move widgets inside a Layout view, from one Layout view to another and from one layout file to another.
  • Contextual menu with enum/flag type properties.
  • New zoom controls.
• New HierarchyViewer plug-in integrated in Eclipse.
• Android launch configurations don't recompile the whole workspace on launch anymore.
• android.jar source and javadoc location can now be configured.

Dependencies:

ADT 0.9.9 replaces ADT 0.9.8 and is designed for use with SDK Tools r7 and later. ADT 0.9.9 includes the ADT 0.9.8 features as well as an important bugfix, so we recommend that you upgrade as soon as possible. If you haven't already installed SDK Tools r7 into your SDK, use the Android SDK Manager to do so.

General notes:

• Fixes a problem in project import, in which source files were deleted in some cases.
• Includes all other ADT 0.9.8 features (see below).

Dependencies:

ADT 0.9.8 is now deprecated. Please use ADT 0.9.9 instead.

General notes:

• Adds a new Action, "Rename Application Package", to the Android Tools contextual menu. The Action does a full application package refactoring.
• Adds support for library projects that don't have a source folder called src/. There is now support for any number of source folders, with no name restriction. They can even be in subfolder such as src/java. If you are already working with library projects created in ADT 0.9.7, see Migrating library projects to ADT 0.9.8 for important information about moving to the new ADT environment.
• Adds support for library projects that depend on other library projects.
• Adds support for additional resource qualifiers: car/desk, night/notnight and navexposed/navhidden.
• Adds more device screen types in the layout editor. All screen resolution/density combinations listed in the Supporting Multiple Screens are now available.
• Fixes problems with handling of library project names that contain characters that are incompatible with the Eclipse path variable. Now properly sets up the link between the main project and the library project.

Library projects:

The ADT Plugin now supports the use of library projects during development, a capability that lets you store shared Android application code and resources in a separate development project. You can then reference the library project from other Android projects and, at build time, the tools compile the shared code and resources as part of the dependent applications. More information about this feature is available in the Creating and Managing Projects document.

If you are not developing in Eclipse, SDK Tools r6 provides the equivalent library project support through the Ant build system.

Dependencies:

ADT 0.9.6 is designed for use with SDK Tools r5 and later. Before updating to ADT 0.9.6, we highly recommend that you use the Android SDK and AVD Manager to install SDK Tools r5 into your SDK.

General Notes:

• Editing default.properties outside of Eclipse will now automatically update the project.
• Loads the SDK content only when a project requires it. This will make Eclipse use less resources when the SDK contains many versions of Android.
• Resolves potential deadlock between modal dialogs, when launching ADT the first time with the SDK Usage panel.
• Fixes issues with the New Project Wizard when selecting samples.

AVD/SDK Manager:

• Adds support for platform samples components.
• Improves support for dependency between components.
• AVDs now sorted by API level.
• The AVD creation dialog now enforces a minimum SD card size of 9MB.
• Prevents deletion of running AVDs.

DDMS:

• DDMS plug-in now contains the Allocation Tracker view.
• New action in the Logcat view: "Go to problem" lets you go directly from an exception trace output to the code.

Editors:

• Explode mode in the Visual Layout Editor adds a margin to all layout objects so that it's easier to see embedded or empty layouts.
• Outline mode in the Visual Layout Editor draws layout outline to make it easier to see layout objects.
• Several fixes in the configuration selector of the Visual Layout Editor.

Application launching:

• Applications launched from ADT now behave as if they were clicked from the Home screen.
• Fixes issue where add-on with no optional library would not show up as valid targets for application launches.
• Resolves possible crash when launching applications.

Dependencies:

ADT 0.9.5 requires features provided in SDK Tools r4 or higher. If you install ADT 0.9.5, which is highly recommended, you should use the Android SDK and AVD Manager to download the latest SDK Tools into your SDK. For more information, see Adding SDK Components.

General notes:

• AVD Launch dialog now shows scale value.
• Fixes potential NPE in SDK Manager on AVD launch, for older AVD with no skin name specified.
• Fixes XML validation issue in on older Java versions.
• .apk packaging now properly ignores vi swap files as well as hidden files.

Dependencies:

ADT 0.9.4 requires features provided in SDK Tools r3 or higher. If you install ADT 0.9.4, which is highly recommended, you should use the Android SDK and AVD Manager to download the latest SDK Tools into your SDK. For more information, see Adding SDK Components.

Project Creation Wizard:

• New option to create a project from a sample by choosing it from a list.

Layout Editor:

• Improved Configuration selector that lets you see how your layout will render on different devices. Default device descriptions include ADP1 and Google Ion, while SDK add-ons can also provide new descriptions. A new UI allows you to create custom descriptions.
• Adds a new clipping toggle, to let you see your full layout even if it's bigger than the screen.

DDMS integration:

• Includes the improvements from the standlone DDMS, revision 3.
• Adds an option to open HPROF files into eclipse instead of writing them on disk. If a profiler such as MAT (Memory Analyzer Tool) is installed, it'll open the file.

Android SDK and AVD Manager integration:

• Includes the improvements from the standalone Android SDK and AVD Manager, revision 3.