development is more important than ever.

And as the Android platform matured,

so have our needs as developers.

Making great apps is so much easier

when you have a rich and complete dev environment.

And this was the driving decision behind the creation

of Android Studio.

I an Wojtek Kalicinski, and I'm going

to show you why you should be using this powerful new tool.

Android Studio is Google's official IDE

for Android development.

We've combined a robust code editor with an entirely new

build system based on Gradle.

Let's talk about the editor first.

The Getting Started experience is crucial for every app

developer.

So in Android Studio, we focus on making

it easy to create new projects, as well as adding modules

to support Android TV, Android Wear, Glass, and even

the Google Cloud backend.

All you need this to use one of the provided wizards,

and the selected modules will be added

to your project, along with code templates that let you dive

into coding quickly.

For those of you coming from Eclipse,

we've included a tool that lets you import legacy projects.

Not only will it create a new Gradle build configuration

for your app and fix your project structure

behind the scenes, it also identifies

commonly used libraries and brings them in as dependencies,

eliminating the horrible process of moving folders manually

and getting your build to work.

If you just want to check out our samples,

there's now a one-click solution to import them directly

from Google's repository on GitHub

into a ready-to-build and run project.

One of my personal favorites when

working with Android Studio is the new Project View.

It offers a flattened representation of your project

structure, giving quick access to code, resources,

and build files.

In fact, Android Studio will now only list each resource once,

regardless of which configurations

like density or screen size are included in your project.

You can always expand the resource node

and check out all its versions.

When it comes to getting things done and writing code,

Android Studio helps you to stay productive,

while at the same time making sure that you write

clean and error-free code.

Apart from the usual helpers you would

expect from your IDE, like code completion and access

to documentation, we've added powerful new code inspections

and refactorings, targeting performance and compatibility.

You can now easily extract strings into resources,

or even add right to left support to all your layouts

with one click.

To make sure you never again press the wrong resource type

to a method, add one of these annotations to its parameters.

Many of the framework methods are annotated as well,

so Android Studio will show an error

if it encounters, for example, an RGB value where

a color resource is expected.

Android Studio supports your development flow,

which includes working with both Java and XML files.

It's easy to switch between your classes and relevant resources

by clicking this icon, or Control

clicking any part of the resource name in your code.

You even got handy previews of bitmaps

right there in the Editor window.

To get a quick look at what your resource looks

like for different configurations,

or explore theme attributes in the Layout Editor,

use the Quick Documentation View.

You can access it by pressing Control Q or F1,

depending on your settings.

For editing layouts, there is the choice

of using the visual design editor, where

you can drag and drop views on to the Canvas

and manipulate their properties.

Or if you prefer, you can seamlessly

switch to editing XML files directly and see the preview

update in real time.

Android Studio will alert you whenever

you forget to set the required attribute on your views,

such as layout width or height, and can even identify

common performance problems.

If you want to see how your layouts behave

on different screen sizes, or if your translated strings fit

correctly in other locales, you can

switch to multi-preview mode.

This will show your layout simultaneously,

side-by-side on multiple device configurations.

You can even look at how your custom themes and styles behave

across Android versions, which I have to say

is pretty useful when you're targeting older devices.

Oh, and by the way, if you are thinking

of localizing your app, just use the brand new translation

editor that we've created to streamline this task.

As always, our Android tools are being built in the open.

You can follow the progress and get more information

at tools.android.com.

If you haven't already done so, download Android Studio

from the Android developer site.

Also, be sure to follow our Google + page,

and join the Android Tools community

for updates about new features and releases.

Tune into our next video in the Android Studio DevBytes

series, where we'll take a closer look at the new

build system based on Gradle.