ADT 21 preview 5 pronto per il download

Come gli sviluppatori in ascolto certo sapranno, ADT è il plugin per Eclipse che ormai dal lungo tempo accompagna coloro che vogliano usare la celebre IDE nella creazione delle proprie app per Android. Sebbene non introduca quindi novità di grande rilievo, vi segnaliamo il rilascio della preview 5 di ADT 21.

La nuova versione del plugin funziona su Eclipse 3.6.2 e successivi e necessita la preview degli android-tools 21 che potete scaricare dall'SDK manager, mentre per quanto riguarda il plugin stesso lo trovate al seguente indirizzo, assieme al corposo changelog, che riportiamo qui sotto:

• Build system
  • Fixed manifest merger to properly adapt library classes in the merged manifest.
  • Libraries (both jar files and library projects) are now pre-dexed, improving build time.
  • The R classes for library projects are generated with only the IDs needed by the libraries, reducing the risk of hitting dex files limits for fields and methods.
  • Several editing features (code completion, resource chooser, go to declaration) properly handle library project resources now.
• Lint
  • A couple of new checks: you must explicitly decide whether your app allows backups, and a label check. There's a new command line flag for setting the library path. Many improvements to the incremental lint analysis while editing.
• Layout editor
  • The layout editor no longer forces all variations of a single layout into a single editor. You can for example open both the landscape and portrait versions of a layout as separate editors and quickly switch between them, or even re-dock your editors to edit them simultaneously. If you prefer the previous behavior there's a setting under Android > Editors to configure the old behavior.
  • Improved device menu in the configuration chooser
  • If a custom view throws exceptions during rendering or construction, the relevant part of the stacktrace is now shown in the layout editor's error display on the bottom, and the stack frames are hyperlinked.
• Editors
  • The IDE remembers (for each type of editor - layout, manifest, values) whether you were last editing in XML or graphical mode, and uses that mode for newly opened files. This means that if you for example prefer to work with just XML, the IDE will start just showing you XML editors after you've switched to them for each type of editor.
  • Attributes and resources in values are validated on save again
• GL Trace
  • Ability to export images and frames