MOTODEV Studio for Android Blog articles

Announcing MOTODEV Studio 4.1

EricC — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 20:11:27 GMT

Hello Everyone!

One of the drawbacks of being a manager is I long for the days when I wasn’t a manager. This was when things were simple and I just had to worry about the code I wrote. At least that’s the way I remember life before Product Management. The MOTODEV tools team won’t let me submit code into production, so I have to keep my code skills up to date on my own.

I started writing an Android app late last year and I’ve been improving it every now and then. I started the project because I wanted to better understand how developers use our tools and what the pain points are. What came out of that experiment is a new laundry list of requirements for the dev team. I think they hope I give up development and stick to comedy in the future.

I’m here today to announce that the latest release of MOTODEV Studio is now available from the download site. I’m hoping that some of the requirements I came up with will make your jobs easier.

One Step Forward, One Step Back

I’m going to back up a step before going into the new features of MOTODEV Studio. I want to remind everyone that there are now 2 distinct ways to install MOTODEV Studio. How you work with the ADT plugins and the Android SDK will govern how you install the product. I’m going to paraphrase from my earlier MOTODEV Studio 4.0 announcement...

Do you always want the latest plugins and SDK tools the moment the Android tools team releases them?

If the answer to that question is “No”, then you should continue to install MOTODEV Studio the way you always have. Just download the install package from our web site or the Eclipse plugin archive and work the way you always have. Or choose “Update MOTODEV Studio” from the MOTODEV menu. The installer version of MOTODEV Studio is locked to a specific version of ADT (and by extension the Android SDK). When a new version of the plugins or SDK are released, we won’t support it until the next release of MOTODEV Studio.

If you answered “Yes” then you will need to install the “MOTODEV Core Plugins”. This package has no dependencies on ADT, yet it delivers much of the functionality of the full product. Using this package, you can update Eclipse and/or ADT independent of the MOTODEV plugins and everything should continue to work. You will notice that the locations of things will have moved to accommodate working inside the Java Perspective, but most of the functionality is still there. There is no installer for the core plugins--you download and install Eclipse separately and then install the MOTODEV plugins using Help>Eclipse Marketplace. For developers who are interested primarily in developing for Android, the new Eclipse for Mobile Developers package is configured to work with ADT and the MOTODEV core plugins.

Keys to the Kingdom

One of the things I felt was confusing when I was writing my app this spring was the way apps are signed before going into the Google Play store. The Android development process allows developers to create their keys and sign apps with those keys. This was a big change from the previous world we were used to with Java ME where a manufacturer or carrier would bless an app with a certificate from their central authority. We had some signing capabilities in MOTODEV Studio that we carried over from the Java ME days, but they really weren’t in tune with what Android developers needed.

We tore out the old signing view and created something new that works with multiple keystore formats and gives you a lot of options for managing keys and signing apps. This view and the way it works is compatible with the jarsigner process that is used by the ADT export wizard. In most cases, it is calling the same tools underneath, but we use context and serialization to make many of the workflows simpler.

After you’ve installed MOTODEV Studio 4.1, this view should be visible along the bottom of the workspace with the problems view, device manager, etc. Eclipse has difficulty dealing with new or changed views in existing workspaces, so if you do not see the view, you can manually add it with Window>Show View>Other. Another way to make it appear is to reset the perspective (if you use the MOTODEV Studio perspective) with Window>Reset Perspective.

This view provides the ability to back up your keystores and gives you a subtle reminder of the last time you backed up. I’ll bet many of you don’t do this often enough. If you were to lose your keystore, you wouldn’t be able to update your app on the Google Play store. Even more problematic is you would have to use a different signature in the new app’s manifest. Would your users be happy if they had to install a completely new version of the app, just because you changed the signing key? What if you had a paid app or one that dozens of other apps relied on? Even if you don’t use this feature, please back up your keystore today.

The Signing and Keys view is available in the full product of MOTODEV Studio, but it is not in the core plugins because it requires information from ADT.

Ring in the New

Every year, the Eclipse Foundation creates a coordinated release in late June. Last year, the code name for the release was called “Indigo” and this year it is “Juno”. In years past, the MOTODEV tools team has participated in the train by including the Sequoyah open source components. This year, we opted out, but we haven’t been quiet. Myself and several of the MOTODEV tools team created a new “Eclipse for Mobile Developers” package that anyone can use to create their mobile IDE. In fact, we used this package as the basis for MOTODEV Studio 4.1.

Google released new ADT plugins at the Google IO conference in late June. These plugins support the latest SDK tools and platforms for Jelly Bean and earlier. There were a few bugs reported in the plugins, so Google has released an update to version 20.0.1. MOTODEV Studio 4.1 contains these updated plugins.

NOTE: As we were pushing this release out, Google made another update of the ADT plugins to fix a critical bug. Our testing shows that this release works with MOTODEV Studio 4.1. If you need to update to get this patch, you are encouraged to do so using MOTODEV>Update MOTODEV Studio.

Ring out the Old

As a product manager or developer, it’s important to look at your product with a critical eye and see if it’s still relevant to your customers. This is true, no matter what the product and whether it’s free or costs money. Based on the download reports I get, more people are downloading MOTODEV Studio than ever before. This leads me to hope that we're doing the right things, but without a critical eye, we might get complacent.

There have been quite a few features that MOTODEV Studio had in earlier times. For example the ability to download the SDK and platforms from the IDE. At some point, the Google plugins gained this ability, so our feature was no longer necessary. In a similar vein, the ability to download SDK addons for the emulator has been in our tools for a long time, but now the Android SDK Manager provides the same function. We’ve spent some time this release removing our overlapping features. Several of these features were grouped under the Download Components window, which is now gone from the MOTODEV menu.

One feature that overlaps in a way, but isn’t going away, is our App Validator. This static analysis tool does overlap in its function with the Android ‘lint’ tool, but lint does not do everything that App Validator does. At least not yet. We don’t want to compete with our friends at Google on tools, especially since all our tools are free, but we also see that this tool still has some usefulness. Use both tools to improve your apps and when the time comes, we will look to put App Validator out to pasture if it makes sense to do so.

The Fork in the Road

Where do we go from here? Now that the Google acquisition of Motorola is complete, we hope to have some intense discussions about tools. There’s nothing to announce at this time because we’re all still digging out from Google IO, summer vacations, and things like that. When we have some news for you on that front, I’ll let you know.

Until then, keep developing great apps. If you have problems with the tools or getting them installed, let us know on our discussion boards.

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio

Eric

MOTODEV Studio 4.0 and the ADT 20 plugins

EricC — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 20:18:01 GMT

Hello everyone,

Two weeks ago at Google I/O, we saw the release of a new Android version and new tools for the SDK. These tools had been anticipated for some time and I wanted to update you on where we stand with MOTODEV Studio.

When we announced MOTODEV Studio 4.0 in May, I pointed out in this blog post that we were splitting the concept of the MOTODEV tools into 2 pieces. The standalone product with the installer was tightly integrated with the ADT plugins and requires work on our part whenever ADT is updated. At the same time, we also announced a new “core plugins” feature that can be installed into Eclipse that has no dependencies on ADT whatsoever. While the look of the two versions is different, most of the functionality of the full product exists in the core plugins. The full product is meant to be stable, but would only be updated on our quarterly schedule. When new versions of ADT come out, they may or may not work with the existing full MOTODEV Studio but they should work with Eclipse and the MOTODEV core plugins.

For this reason, we locked MOTODEV Studio 4.0 to ADT 18 in order to prevent updates that would result in a breakage due to API changes beyond our control. Unfortunately, the SDK Manager allowed developers to update their SDK tools and SDK 20 has problems with ADT 18. We’re working on a new version of MOTODEV Studio that has ADT 20 (or 20.0.1) already built-in that works with SDK tools 20. I anticipate you will have access to it in a few weeks. Until that time, you should not update the SDK tools or attempt to manually install ADT 20 into MOTODEV Studio.

If you are using the MOTODEV core plugins with Eclipse, you can use ADT 20 and SDK Tools 20.

Roll back SDK tools

If you’ve already updated to SDK Tools 20 and you’re using the installed MOTODEV Studio, there’s a good chance that things will not work correctly. Especially when debugging with the emulator. If you want to continue using the MOTODEV Studio tools to develop for Ice Cream Sandwich and earlier, you can download the older SDK tools version 19 at http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r19-windows.zip. Mac OSX and Linux users will have slightly different file names.

Using the links above as a template, you can download older versions of the SDK by providing a different release number. The same formula works for the ADT plugins, which can be found at http://dl.google.com/android/ADT-18.0.0.zip.

Using Eclipse

For developers who need to target Jelly Bean before MOTODEV Studio 4.1 is released, the best solution is to use a clean installation of Eclipse, such as the new Eclipse for Mobile Developers package and update your tools to the latest release (version 20 at this time). Unzip the Eclipse package into a convenient location on your development machine.

Once you have Eclipse downloaded and installed, launch the IDE and use the Marketplace client (Help>Eclipse Marketplace) to locate either the Android Development Tools or the MOTODEV Core Plugins. You can also install from the web link by dragging the button labeled “Install” onto your running version of Eclipse. The MOTODEV core plugins from the Eclipse Marketplace are linked to depend on ADT, so if you want to install both, just use the MOTODEV link.

If you’re more comfortable with the Eclipse Update Manager rather than the Marketplace Client, you can install the MOTODEV core plugins from our site as well. Use Help>Install New Software and create a new update site whose link is https://studio-android.motodevupdate.com/android/4.0/basic.

If you find any problems using MOTODEV Studio with ADT 18 or the core plugins with ADT 20, please let us know on the discussion boards.

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio

Eric

Announcing MOTODEV Studio 4.0

EricC — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:37:07 GMT

Hello everyone,

It’s time again for for a release of MOTODEV Studio. I’d like to invite you to get a cup of coffee or a cold beverage before starting to read this article. There’s stuff in here you’ll want to read and it will affect how you use MOTODEV Studio now and in the future. I’ll try not to bore you too much, but there are some changes and they will affect some of you.

Dependencies

I said I’ll try not to bore you, but I think some background is helpful. If you want the TL;DR version, skip to the next major heading titled "If You Read Nothing Else, Read This".

MOTODEV Studio consists of several things:

An installer that works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS
The most recent version of Eclipse
The most recent Google ADT plugins
Tools and plugins that we’ve written, such as code snippets, App Validator, localization editor, etc.

In the early days of MOTODEV Studio, we built ADT ourselves because we wanted to make some changes to the package. ADT needed some improvements and we felt we could provide them. We realized early on that this was a bad idea with the pace of ADT releases. Eventually we got where we were just bundling ADT as it came from Google.

Some of the MOTODEV Studio features that we find useful call APIs inside ADT. Some of the conveniences, such as our debugger launch configuration, use information gleaned from ADT to populate the launch dialog. In other words, we came to depend on ADT and that dependency comes at a price.

If you’ve been using MOTODEV Studio for a while and have been reading our discussion boards, you’ve no doubt seen some posts addressing new ADT releases. When ADT releases come out, we stop development for a day or two, install the plugins on our test machines, and determine if the plugins are safe for everyone. Some times they are, and some times we have to plan an interim release. The typical causes of interim releases are an API or functionality change inside ADT, but some times it’s a command line change for one of the SDK tools, such as the emulator. We can (and do) watch the external repo for the SDK tools and this helps us plan our activities, but until the branch is tagged we really don’t know what the final results will be.

As the pace of tools releases have accelerated over the last six months, we came to realize that we could not sustain the pace of testing and interim releases to MOTODEV Studio. This is where the change comes in...

If You Read Nothing Else, Read This

If you’ve been using MOTODEV Studio in previous releases, I hope you’ve seen that we try to make the transition between updates as painless as possible. We’ll try to do the same with this release, but you have a decision to make and it will affect how you install MOTODEV Studio now and in the future.

Regardless of which choice you make, we will continue to provide support for you on the MOTODEV Studio Discussion Board. Also, your projects and workspaces will work no matter which version you use, so if you decide to use one and change your mind later, your code and settings are safe.

Riddle Me This

Answer this question and use it to guide your actions: Do I always want the latest plugins and SDK tools the moment the Android tools team releases them?

If the answer to that question is “No”, then you should continue to install MOTODEV Studio the way you always have. Just download the install package from our web site or the Eclipse plugin archive and work the way you always have. Or choose “Update MOTODEV Studio” from the MOTODEV menu.

Why would you do this? Why wouldn’t you always take the latest SDK? In most cases, it’s for stability. If you’re in the middle of a project, you don’t want to introduce changes from underneath unless you need them. Maybe there’s a bug fix in the tools you need, in which case it’s perfectly valid to update, but most of the time you may want to wait for the end of the project cycle before updating your tools.

By choosing this route, you accept that we (the MOTODEV team) may go the full release cycle without an interim update. During which time the Android tools team might’ve released 2 ADT updates and a newer set of SDK tools. We’ll have those integrated in the next release of MOTODEV Studio, but it may be as long as 3 or 4 months until that time.

MOTODEV Core Plugins

If you answered “Yes” to my question above, then you will need to take a different route. If you’re updating the SDK and plugins frequently, we assume you’re a bleeding edge type of developer. For you, we’ve created a slimmer set of tools that we call the “MOTODEV Core Plugins”. This package has no dependencies on ADT yet it delivers much of the functionality of the full product. Using this package, you can update Eclipse and/or ADT independent of the MOTODEV plugins and everything should continue to work. You will notice that the locations of things will have moved to accommodate working inside the Java Perspective, but the functionality should still be there. There is a complete list of differences in the release notes under the New Packaging Option section.

The tradeoff is that the MOTODEV Core Plugins are truly a set of plugins and there is no installer. The burden of creating and maintaining your development environment falls on you. You will need to download and install Eclipse on your own prior to installing the MOTODEV Core Plugins. Creating an update site for the MOTODEV Core Plugins is no different than installing the ADT plugins--it’s just another update site. It’s not a difficult task and we’ve documented the steps you need to go through in our installation guide.

We are looking forward to people using this new package. We’ve wanted to get to this point for quite some time and now that we’re there, we hope it makes your development easier. If you have problems or suggestions, let us know on our discussion boards.

We're planning some documentation for users of the MOTODEV Core Plugins. Where MOTODEV Studio users had a perspective to work in, these plugins access the MOTODEV features inside other perspectives. This will require some time to create, but watch the discussion boards and the @motodev twitter account for announcements.

In Other News

Now that we’ve gotten the big one out of the way, let’s talk about the other changes we’ve made to MOTODEV Studio.

Code Generation

I released my first app on Google Play a few weeks ago. I’m biased, but I have to say that I love our feature that takes the contents of a layout and generates the Java code for it. It makes the tedious actions much less of a burden. If you haven’t noticed this in the past, definitely give it a look.

We’ve added to the existing tools to include code generation for menus. Start by creating res/menu/menu.xml, then choose “Generate Java Code Based on Menu XML Files” from the MOTODEV menu. You’ll get a wizard dialog that will show you all your projects and your Java source files that can handle the menu code.

For example, consider this menu definition:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
 <item android:id="@+id/about" android:title="@string/about"></item>
 <item android:id="@+id/settings" android:title="@string/settings"></item>
 <item android:id="@+id/new_game" android:title="@string/new_game"></item>
 <item android:id="@+id/undo" android:title="@string/undo"></item>
</menu>

The result is the Java code below. It’s not groundbreaking, but it does save you a lot of typing. If you modify the menu.xml later in your project, you can run the wizard again to regenerate the onOptionItemsSelected() method.

public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
	MenuInflater inflater = getMenuInflater();
	inflater.inflate(R.menu.main, menu);
	return true;
}

public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {
	if (item.getItemId() == R.id.about) {
	} else if (item.getItemId() == R.id.settings) {
	} else if (item.getItemId() == R.id.new_game) {
	} else {
		return super.onOptionsItemSelected(item);
	}
	return true;
}

If you’re using the MOTODEV Core Plugins, you’ll have to use the existing Eclipse menu hierarchy. For example, right click on a Java file in the Project Explorer, choose the Source sub-menu and you’ll notice the MOTODEV code generation items at the bottom of the list.

Database Management

We’ve been shipping a database tool since the first releases of MOTODEV Studio. This is one of the pieces that needed a lot of cleanup when we refactored the code. While we were in there, we spent some time cleaning up the user interface and removing pieces that didn’t make sense for SQLite databases. The result is a much cleaner and easier to use tool. If you ship a database with your app or if you need to inspect databases as part of your debugging, you’ll appreciate this feature.

The database feature is in its own perspective because there are quite a few different views. Go to “Window->Open Perspective->Other” and find the MOTODEV Database perspective. Once you’ve opened it the first time, you can select it from the perspective chooser in the upper right corner of the IDE.

You can use the database perspective with any running emulator. You can also use it with developer phones that have root permissions enabled for the /data partition.

If your phone doesn’t have root access, don’t despair. Write your databases to the SD card by modifying the SQLiteDatabase.openOrCreateDatabase() call with the full path to the card. Once you’ve created the SD card database, mount the phone as removable storage and use the “Map Database” feature to access the contents of the database on your production phone. Once you’ve solved your problems, reset the database API back to the default partition so your data remains secure.

App Validator

You should be using the App Validator to pre-flight your apps before you distribute them. It provides many tests that can keep you from having to do quick turnaround releases.

Since the App Validator was released nearly two years ago, we’ve spent most of our efforts on providing new types of tests. For this release, we’ve added some new tests, but we’ve also focused on usability. In addition to working from the Problems view, the App Validator now supports Quick Fixes. If the tool can determine the best course of action for you to fix your app, it will put a light bulb next to the icon in the problems view or in the left margin of the editor window. To fix the problem, right click and choose Quick Fix. Follow the wizard instructions after that.

App Validator is available as a stand-alone tool, which will benefit larger development teams and companies that utilize continuous build systems. By putting App Validator into your build scripts, you can watch for new problems as they arise.

Developers who have unique conditions that need to be tested can customize the App Validator with the App Validator SDK. There are samples and documentation to guide you to extending this powerful tool to meet your own needs. We know you don’t want to create a new tool from scratch, which is why we’ve distilled the SDK down to just the pieces you need to test and report on your unique conditions.

Version numbering

We bumped the version number to 4.0. Normally we bump the number when we go to the next release of Eclipse. This time we bumped the version number because we made some significant changes to the architecture and release mechanisms of MOTODEV Studio. We felt like this was a significant change and we wanted to cement in users minds that something big was up.

The Road Ahead

We’re starting to look at what we’re going to do for Studio 4.1. We’re doing some investigations and we’re starting to determine what features we will support for the next release.

We’re planning to work on a new Eclipse package that developers can use as the basis for their Android work. This is a community project that will help all developers, regardless of whether they use MOTODEV Studio or just want to use the basic features of Eclipse + ADT. It will also be what we use for the foundation of the next version of MOTODEV Studio and what we will use to test our plugins against.

As we were finishing up the release efforts for Studio 4.0, the Android tools team released a preview of ADT 20. We suspect we will get requests to support the release in the full version of MOTODEV Studio, but we have a busy schedule the next few months. Our first look at the package showed many changes in ADT 20. When Google releases this package to the world, we’ll evaluate and report on what we can do.

Support for C code with the Native Development Kit (NDK) is coming in ADT20. This is similar to a feature that we integrated into MOTODEV Studio from a contribution to the Eclipse Sequoyah project. The contributor who submitted to Sequoyah also submitted to the AOSP, where the code is a better fit. When ADT 20 comes out with NDK support, we will begin to retire the MOTODEV Studio feature.

Thanks again for using MOTODEV Studio and App Validator. I hope this release is something you will enjoy and use to create great apps. Let us know if you have ideas for things we can do to make your lives easier.

Eric Cloninger, Sr. Product Manager, MOTODEV Tools
Greg Wilson, Developer Evangelist, Motorola Mobility
Julia Perdigueiro, Technical Lead, MOTODEV Tools

MOTODEV Studio 3.1 now available

EricC — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:47:16 GMT

Happy New Year everyone!

I hope the holidays were good for everyone. I took some time away from work and cleaned out 10 years of accumulated boxes from our garage. I also ran Ethernet cable through the attic to my kids’ rooms for their computers and the Xbox. So, I earned points with everyone in the house.

I used my “bonus time” for several days to write an app for my DROID RAZR. As odd as it may seem, I don’t get to write a lot of code. The chance to sit down and design again is actually a joy. I can’t tell you how excited I was to look up one of those nights and see that it was 2 a.m. It’s been several years since I’ve done that. My app isn’t ready to unveil, but this has been a great experience as both a developer and as a product manager.

Most of the time, when I demo MOTODEV Studio or the App Validator, it’s in short stretches for 10 or 15 minutes at a time. During the holiday break, I used MOTODEV Studio 3.1 and App Validator for 3 days and I took copious notes. I love hearing from users about how they love our tools, but I also like hearing how we can do better. In the case of my own development, I loved the wizards for creating activities and the string editor. We’re starting our next wave of development and my ideas as well as yours are crucial to making a great experience for all Android developers.

Installers Available

As I mentioned in mid-December, we made MOTODEV Studio 3.1 available as an online update. I’m now happy to announce that the installer packages are available for download at the MOTODEV site. In my previous post, I mentioned that this package contains the latest Google ADT plugins (version 16.0.1). Some highlights of this new release are

The Localization Files Editor automatic translation feature now supports the Google Translate v2 API
Generated database classes now follow the Java naming standards
Automatic generation of code that saves and restores the app state
New code snippets, including some for the new Ice Cream Sandwich SDK, such as Finding Faces

Find Faces code snippet in MOTODEV Studio 3.1

These things are in addition to many bug fixes that we’ve made in the product--bug fixes we’ve made in open source components and updates to open source components from Eclipse. Overall it’s another stable release and I didn’t have any problems with it for my own development, plus the hundreds of man hours of testing that went in before it was released.

There’s a New Kid in Town

For the past 18 months, we’ve talked about the MOTODEV App Validator and it’s been a vital part of MOTODEV Studio. With this release, we’re now providing another way to download and install the tool. App Validator is now available as a separate download from the tools download page (scroll down a bit).

Developers who want to test their apps but don’t want to use MOTODEV Studio are encouraged to download this free command-line tool. Installation is a matter of simply extracting the archive wherever you want the tool to run, preferably somewhere on your $PATH. The tool starts from a batch file or shell script called ‘appvalidator’ and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Support is available on our discussion boards, the same as for MOTODEV Studio.

Farewell (features)

Every release means evaluating requirements and determining what makes sense to support. This release was no different.

Two years ago, we started a project of translating our products to Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese. We went so far as to translate some of our open-source pieces as well. It was a fun project, but it is a lot of work to manage the changes of string resources between versions. While it would be nice to have translators work using the same Agile methods and tools that our developers do, the truth is they don’t and probably won’t for many years. So, we’ve removed the translations from MOTODEV Studio and the language packs from the download pages.

In our Download Components screen, we’ve removed the tool that allowed users to download SDK addons (emulator images) via MOTODEV Studio. This is because developers can download these files via our web site and the Google SDK manager provides this function now. We’ve submitted our link to Google and as soon as it’s approved and activated, you will be able to download Motorola addons directly from the SDK Manager.

Finally, as for host OS support, not a lot changed. We always evaluate where we stand and I’m seeing a lot more users switching to 64-bit this last quarter. Linux developers are picking up, but the thing to point out is that we test on Ubuntu and Fedora using VirtualBox. If you have your own favorite combination (and most Linux users do), please help us by trying to eliminate as many variables as possible.

To 2012 (and beyond)

Once again, I’d like to thank everyone for their support and feedback of MOTODEV Studio and our tools in 2011. We look forward to working with you again in 2012.

Eric

MOTODEV Studio 3.1.0 Update Site Available

EricC — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:11:03 GMT

Happy Solstice everyone (Winter and Summer)!

The MOTODEV tools team has a present for all you good Android developers. Fresh from the oven (or off the barbeque for our antipodean friends) is a fresh release of MOTODEV Studio.

In this release, we've added several new items:

Support for the ADT plugins (version 16.0.1) that were released last Friday
The automatic translation feature now supports the Google Translate v2 API
Generated database classes now follow the Java naming standards
Automatic generation of code that saves and restores the app state
New code snippets

We're doing this release today in a restricted manner (as an update only) because the holidays are upon us. Many of the MOTODEV team members will be on holiday beginning this Friday and at different times through the next 12 days. While we will be monitoring the discussion boards, we won't be back to our full staff level until January 3rd. We're confident that MOTODEV Studio 3.1 will be fine, but we won't be as quick to answer questions as we would be at other times of the year.

Most users should continue to use Studio 3.0.x until after the New Year. Users who want access to the latest plugins, including ADT 16, the way to access this release is via the MOTODEV menu. Choose MOTODEV -> Update MOTODEV Studio as shown below.

We'll have the standalone installers and a plugin archive ready to go when we return from the break. We also have something new that I think you'll enjoy.

On behalf of the MOTODEV tools team, I would like to thank you all for downloading and using MOTODEV Studio this year. We've had a lot of great feedback from everyone and we've enjoyed working with you.

Best wishes for joyful New Year and a prosperous and happy 2012.

Eric

MOTODEV Studio 3.0.2 update is now available

EricC — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:59:36 GMT

Hello Everyone!

This is just a quick post to let you know that we’ve released MOTODEV Studio 3.0.2 as an update. This update is available by going to the MOTODEV menu and selecting “Update MOTODEV Studio”.

This update brings in a several bug fixes to the App Validator that we found as a result of testing with Android SDK version 15. It also brings in the official ADT 15 plugins from Google. If you’ve already manually integrated ADT 15 yourself, then you are fine with the tools you have, unless you want the bug fixes to the App Validator.

If you are updating from MOTODEV Studio 3.0.0 or earlier, you will want to simultaneously update your Android SDK to version 15. Because the version of ADT that is included with this update is intended to work with SDK version 15, you will start to get compile errors in your projects if you update them out of step with each other.

You might’ve seen some of my posts on our discussion boards or links to articles at the Android developer site on changes to the tools for Ice Cream Sandwich. If you’ve been using R.constant values in your projects in switch statements, you will need to spend some time refactoring those into if-else blocks before moving to SDK 15.

Other than the R.constant issue, there should be no major changes to MOTODEV Studio 3.0.0 users with this release. In fact, with the ADT 15 release, it appears that Google has fixed quite a few usability problems that were reported in ADT 14.

Thanks you for using MOTODEV Studio!

Eric

Announcing the MOTODEV App Validator SDK Beta

EricC — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:38:27 GMT

Hello everyone,

App quality is the result of many diligent practices, one of which is testing. I hope our users have taken advantage of the MOTODEV App Validator. If not, I understand. Perhaps we’ve made it difficult to see, use, or understand. We’re working to fix that and you will see improvements to usability in the future as well as training on how to use the tool inside MOTODEV Studio and on the command line.

The App Validator is more than just a testing tool, though. When we first created it, we knew that Android would be rapidly evolving the way it is now and we knew there would be many new conditions that would arise that needed to be detected. When new OS releases appear, we can write new checkers for the App Validator in about three days because the checkers use the same underlying technology that Eclipse plugins use.

Today, I’m pleased to announce the App Validator Beta SDK. With Eclipse Classic, the Android Development Tools (ADT), and this SDK, you can write your own extensions to the MOTODEV App Validator to check Android applications. The App Validator framework provides the ability to decompose the Android app, enumerate resources, pull apart the app manifest, decompile Java code, and publish reports. Your plugin provides the specific business logic to detect the condition and raises exceptions. The framework handles the rest.

The App Validator runs as a command line tool as well as embedded into the IDE, so an extension built with this SDK will run in both environments. I suspect that most developers who create extensions will insert the tool into their build scripts as a last check before shipping, but I would love to see innovative and crazy things done that I didn’t think of.

These are just some of the things you might do with the App Validator SDK:

Create a plugin to ensure that all the apps you build contain copyright strings in the exact format required by your company’s Legal department (release engineering)
Scan an app to ensure that there are no calls to forbidden or dangerous APIs (IT department “blessing”)
Ensure that small, medium, large, and extra-large layouts exist for every layout that ships or some subset based on rules (design team)

The skills needed to use this SDK are not only Java, but also Eclipse plugin development. The learning curve for Eclipse, just like any robust API set, is rather steep. The good news is that finding skilled Eclipse developers isn’t terribly difficult. The installation guide, Javadocs, and the install .jar file are all available at the MOTODEV Tools and Libraries site. There are two sample plugins that are installed with the the .jar file that you can use to start your own development. The installation experience is typical for Eclipse users and is explained in detail in the install guide.

The SDK is in beta form. We intend to spend some time taking feedback on our discussion boards, so if you use it, please let us know what we can improve in terms of the APIs, the API documentation, the user documentation, and the overall user experience.

Thanks again for using MOTODEV and good luck with your development!

Eric

Announcing the updated MOTODEV App Validator

EricC — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:15:08 GMT

Hello Everyone,

I hope you've had a chance to download and try out MOTODEV Studio 3.0. We've made many improvements to the tools in this release, including the App Validator tool that is integrated into the IDE. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve made those changes available to the online version of the App Validator as well.

If you aren’t aware of this feature of the MOTODEV web site, you should be. The MOTODEV App Validator is a static analysis tool that inspects your Android applications (.apk files) and reports on many different potential problems. Even if you don’t use MOTODEV Studio, you should be taking advantage of this tool.

Here are just a few of the conditions the App Validator can detect:

Invalid signing certificate dates
Not enough permissions in the manifest for the APIs being called
Missing values in translated strings.xml files
Missing drawables for different densities that can lead to Force Close runtime errors
Missing or incorrect layouts for the various screen sizes
Failure to properly close database “cursors”
Compatibility issues for specific Motorola devices

A full list can be found in this online document.

Start by browsing to http://developer.motorola.com/testing/app-validator/. You will see a screen similar to the one shown below. We’ve tested this feature with many browsers on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera support the drag and drop feature in their most recent releases. Internet Explorer, unfortunately, does not. IE users will need to press the “Browse” button on the screen and locate the file with an Open File dialog.

The new online version now gives you the ability to configure settings in a way that is similar to the version in MOTODEV Studio. Many of the command line switches that make the stand-alone tool so powerful are now available in the online tool. By clicking “edit” (next to “Settings”), you are presented with the following screen that allows you to configure the settings that best suit your needs.

From this screen, you can choose which checkers you wish to run. For example, if you don’t want to see messages about missing strings, you can clear the checkbox for “Localization Strings Checker”. If you only want to test the permissions for your app, clear all but the “Permissions Checker”.

In a similar manner, you can choose which devices your app is compared against. For these tests, the validator isn’t executed on the devices, but rather the values found in the manifest and layouts are compared against values for specific Motorola devices or classes of devices, such as those with Extra Large Screen Sizes.

When you’re ready to perform the test, you can click “Close” to save the settings for the current session. If you choose “Make My Defaults”, the choices are saved as a cookie on your computer. The “Restore Factory Defaults” button returns every checkbox to their default state.

When you are ready to test, just drag and drop your .apk files onto the web form. After a few seconds, you will see the results appear, similar to those shown below.

The results show up, as before, in a list at the bottom of the page. We limit the size of the output to 10,000 results to keep bandwidth down. If you want to clear the results of the process and test new apps, the “Clear Results” button will delete all the errors and allow you to continue testing files without reloading the page.

We’ve tried to make the online App Validator as useful as possible for developers while making it easy to understand and use. We hope you find this a benefit of your MOTODEV membership and use the results you find to make positive changes to your own offerings.

We have more changes in the works for both the stand-alone and online App Validator. If you are attending the O’Reilly Android Open conference in October, stop by Ballroom B on Tuesday at 2:00pm for more insight into this powerful tool.

Thank you for being a MOTODEV member!

Eric

Announcing MOTODEV Studio 3.0

EricC — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 23:30:22 GMT

Hello everyone!

It’s my pleasure to announce that MOTODEV Studio 3.0 is now available for download. This update brings in Eclipse 3.7 (aka “Indigo”) and the “tools_r12” version of the ADT plugins.

MOTODEV Studio 3.0 supports Android SDK version 12. We initially planned to release Studio 3.0 after the Android SDK tools_r13 package was released. The recent kernel.org hack attack has had a ripple effect on projects stored there. We anticipated that tools_r13 would be released by now, but it hasn't due to those attacks. We've tested Studio with both the current r12 tools and the tools_r13 branch on kernel.org. For now, work with the current r12 tools with confidence. We will continue to test with tools_r13 on kernel.org. When those tools are released we will ensure that Studio works properly.

We’ve made quite a few changes and have some exciting new features in MOTODEV Studio 3.0. There are also some changes to the way some Studio features work and—we will go through those in this posting. If you need more detail on what’s changed, a great source of information is the MOTODEV Studio release notes and the Installation Guide.

Updates

Over the last year, we’ve worked to improve our update mechanisms. If you want to update MOTODEV Studio 2.x to 3.0, you need only go to the MOTODEV menu and choose “Update MOTODEV Studio”. This operation uses the Eclipse mechanism to connect to the MOTODEV update server. Instead of looking all over the Internet for different update packages, the MOTODEV site has all the packages you need in one place.

If you want to make a clean start with Studio 3.0, you can download the full installer package. If you are a “power user” and already use Eclipse for desktop or server development, you can install MOTODEV Studio as plugins into your existing Eclipse Indigo environment. Both of these options are available from our downloads page.

Regardless of which way you install, you will get the latest Eclipse platform release, the most recent Android ADT plugins, and the many features that MOTODEV Studio provides.

Themes

With every release, the Studio development team and I look for areas to improve. Rather than adding features haphazardly, we like to focus on what we consider “pain points” and see how we can make developers’ lives easier.

Plugin maintenance

One of the themes of every release is updating to the latest Eclipse platform and Android plugins. For Eclipse, it’s a simple matter as the release schedules are published well in advance. The Android plugins aren’t on such a schedule, so there are times when we wake up one morning and notice there are new plugins available. Usually we see this coming as the Android tools team works in the open and their repo is visible at kernel.org.

On a similar vein, we’ve previously announced that we are deprecating our support for 32-bit MacOS systems. This policy takes effect as of this release. Users of 32-bit Macs should continue to use MOTODEV Studio 2.2.2 with the r12 Android SDK for as long as they can. While we haven’t done anything in the plugin archive to prevent users from installing the plugins on 32-bit Macs, we will no longer be testing these configurations or answering support issues involving them.

Feature Discovery

A major theme of the current release was to make things easier to find. We’ve added a lot of functionality the last 2 ½ years and sometimes people are surprised by the appearance of a feature. So, we’ve re-ordered our menus, cleaned up the toolbar, and added more context menu shortcuts.

The most noticeable change in this “discovery” theme is the addition of a new “Videos View”. In addition to creating new features, we’ve added the ability to view YouTube videos from our playlists within the IDE. We’re planning to add a series of videos on using the tools and developing for Android.

No Boring Code

In earlier releases we added the “Code Snippets” view and the ability to generate adapters based on the fields of a database. Now comes a big feature that I know is going to make lot of developers happy. In Studio 3.0, you can now generate a lot of Activity code based on a designed layout. Not only that, you can modify the layouts and re-generate the code without destroying what has already been done. So now, instead of writing all those adapters to toggle a variable when a checkbox is pressed, just design your layout, generate the code, and enter your business logic.

We are working on a video to show this feature in action. In the mean time, give it a try with a blank project and see how it works for you. We're planning to add more functionality to this feature during the next release cycle, so any suggestions on ways to improve its' behavior are appreciated.

Emulator Improvements

We wanted to improve the workflows around running and debugging applications, so we’ve added several features here. The first one improves your ability to install applications: just drag and drop your .apk files onto an item in the Device Management view to start the install process. You can drag from the Eclipse Project Explorer view or from your computers’ desktop manager.

How many times have you gone to launch your app and end up starting an emulator by mistake? Even though you have an emulator running, the launch configuration may be pointing to a different AVD. MOTODEV Studio now checks when you’re launching an Android app to see if there are any compatible AVDs already running. If there are, it asks whether it should use a running instance rather than starting a new one. I’m guessing, based on our experience, this is what developers want about 90% of the time.

App Validator

The App Validator is a part of MOTODEV Studio, but it’s also its own tool. We integrate the tool into the IDE and ship it as part of the product. For this release, we’ve added new checkers that will notify you if you are requesting too many permissions, are missing declarations for large screens, and if you are repeating resource IDs across different files.

In App Validator 0.8, we added the ability to decompile the unobfuscated Java code in your .apk files. We used this information to determine if you were missing permissions and several other features. Now, we’re using this information to look for possible programming mistakes. App Validator 0.9 scans code looking for API calls that cause database cursors to open. It then looks for subsequent calls to close the cursor. If none are found (or it appears that the number of closes is less than the number of opens), you will receive a warning. This is an early feature, so treat the results with some skepticism.

Grab Bag

Themes are a nice tool for project planning, but there are always some features that defy having a specific theme. That doesn’t mean they don’t have value and shouldn’t be included, but these things tend to have less of an impact.

For example, we’ve improved the preference page for the App Validator. In previous releases, users were forced to know the command line switches for a particular function. Now the App Validator has a nice GUI preference page.

Developers who use the database feature a lot should try out the updated database creation wizard. Now, you can create databases and tables from the same dialog and bind them to your Android app using the code generation wizard. If you use databases in your app, you will find this to be a huge time-saver.

The Long and Winding Road

The road ahead looks to be interesting. Ice Cream Sandwich will be making an appearance soon, and the work of the GoogleTV team is available for the adventurous. The MOTODEV Studio team is starting to plan our next release and our activities for 2012. While we don’t know what the future holds for all things Android, we can at least put down a bit of a roadmap.

To start, we’ve contributed a new feature to Android SDK tools. This change will allow developers to discover Motorola SDK add-ons (emulator images) from the SDK and AVD Manager. This has been a feature of MOTODEV Studio, but once the ability for the SDK and AVD Manager to work with the MOTODEV site is available in the SDK tools, we will start phasing it out of MOTODEV Studio.

There’s also some new NDK (Native Development Kit) changes in store for Eclipse users. Doug Schaefer from Wind River contributed code to the AOSP for handling C/C++ projects in a nice way. Doug previously contributed code for C++ support to the Eclipse Sequoyah project and he’s improved it significantly for the AOSP.

We hope that both of these features will be in the “tools_r14” branch that could be out in early October. We usually don’t know about these things until we see the stabilization branch occur in the git repo. We know we will have to update MOTODEV Studio to version 3.0.1 to work with the new plug-ins, so expect to see an update release shortly after the “r14” plug-ins and SDK are released.

We’re beginning to start some investigation into features for 3.1. As always, if you have an idea for a workflow improvement or even something bigger, just drop us a note on the MOTODEV Studio discussion boards. We’re always on the lookout for new ideas that will make your lives easier.

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio!

Eric

MOTODEV Studio for Android 2.2.1 Update available

EricC — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 21:52:25 GMT

Hello MOTODEV Studio users,

A new version of MOTODEV Studio for Android became available on June 15, 2011. This update includes version 11 of the Google ADT plugins, which had some API changes that affected MOTODEV Studio. It also adds support for new Google Translate API policies that affect the Localization Files Editor.

A longer description of the update and how to install it is available on the MOTODEV discussion boards at http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/MOTODEV-Studio-for-Android/Announcing-MOTODEV-Studio-update-version-2-2-1/td-p/15868

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio for Android.

Eric

MOTODEV Studio localization feature and the Google Translate APIs

EricC — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:11:18 GMT

Hello everyone,

Earlier this week, Google announced that they were deprecating the Google Translate APIs, effective immediately. I want to take a moment to explain what this means to MOTODEV Studio users. Click this link to follow the discussion at the MOTODEV Studio discussion boards.

Thanks (again) for using MOTODEV Studio.

Eric

Announcing MOTODEV Studio version 2.2

EricC — Mon, 09 May 2011 23:07:04 GMT

Hello Everyone!

Today we’re announcing the availability of MOTODEV Studio version 2.2 and an update of the MOTODEV App Validator (including the web version). More details on the release can be found in an article on the MOTODEV blog. If you run into any problems downloading, updating, or installing this new release, just post to this thread in the discussion boards. If you run into new problems or have questions, feel free to start a new thread.

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio.

-E

MOTODEV App Validator and Motorola XOOM

EricC — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 18:29:16 GMT

Hello everyone!

I'm excited. I mean I'm Excited!

It's springtime in North America and it's beginning to show. I've got robins and wrens in the birdbath outside my office. I've even got Cardinals, and Bluejays, and Orioles. (Oh My!) I have them on my Motorola XOOM as well. With the Major League Baseball™ app. And that makes me really, really happy.

One of the drawbacks of traveling so much is that I'm never completely certain what time zone I'm in. When I visit the Mother Ship in California, I always miss the early east coast games. And when I'm visiting the MOTODEV Studio team in Brazil, I don't get to follow my team at all (go Rockies!). It's rough being a baseball fan in a fútbol (or F1 racing) country. Which is why my XOOM and the MLB app make a perfect pair.

I'm convinced that Android tablets will conquer the world. I've been carrying a XOOM for a couple months and we're inseparable. I wake to it's soothing glow in the morning and catch the morning news with a cup of coffee. During the day, it chimes at me when tasks are due in Remember the Milk. It's by my side in the evening when we're watching TV. For bedtime reading, I'm currently devouring Stephen King's Dark Tower series as e-books. The Honeycomb e-book app puts my dedicated e-book reader to shame. I'm not quite ready to give up my laptop, but I see the day where I will be using nothing but a mobile phone and a tablet when I'm traveling. The rest of the world will follow our lead.

As a developer, you want your app to be available for these devices. If you don't have access to a tablet, how will you know if it works or not? By now, you've certainly downloaded the Honeycomb SDK and may have used the Android emulator. That will tell you that the code executes, but will it be visible in the market? You could register for one of our upcoming MOTODEV App Summits and try it out, firsthand. That's definitely a good idea, but that doesn't work for everyone.

Well, you've stuck with me this far, so I'll let the cat out of the bag. Today (Friday, April 8), we're releasing a new version of the MOTODEV App Validator. This is an updated version of the online tool we debuted last month on the MOTODEV web site. With this new version of the App Validator, we look at your manifest to make sure you aren't using any features or implied features (via permissions) that might prevent your app from being seen in the Android Market for XOOM users.

Huh?

When you create an Android app, you have to specify certain information about the app in its manifest file. There are sections for features, which explain what hardware or platform features you are using. Some of these features you specify directly, but others are implied by the permissions you request. If you explicitly or implicitly request a feature that doesn't exist for a tablet (such as SMS), then your app is filtered for those devices that don't support it (such as SMS on the XOOM). There are other features that cause market filtering and this test is available for all our devices, not just the XOOM.

If you want a quick way to tell if your app might be filtered, give our latest version of the online app validator a try. Just drag and drop your APK file onto the web browser and you'll have the results in a few seconds. Here's an example of what you might see if you are using SMS in your app...

We're rolling this same functionality into the standalone (desktop) version of App Validator that ships with MOTODEV Studio. I expect that version to be available soon, so check the MOTODEV Studio blog often or subscribe to the MOTODEV Studio RSS feed for immediate notification of news about our award-winning tools.

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio and the MOTODEV App Validator.

Eric

MOTODEV Studio and Android ADT plugins version 10.0.1

EricC — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 23:08:41 GMT

Hello everyone,

This week, Google released ADT plugins version 10.0.1, which have some bug fixes in them. We've tested these plugins with MOTODEV Studio 2.1.1 and found them to work without problems. Details on how to update MOTODEV Studio can be found out our discussion boards at http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/MOTODEV-Studio-for-Android/MOTODEV-Studio-and-Android-ADT-plugins-version-10-0-1/td-p/12912

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio.

Eric

Introducing the MOTODEV App Validator

EricC — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 22:04:35 GMT

The MOTODEV App Validator is a new tool from Motorola that's available with MOTODEV Studio. The App Validator examines apps for problems and lets you know about them before they become problems for your customers. Learn more about this free benefit of being a MOTODEV member by clicking here...

MOTODEV Studio for Android 2.1.1 Update available

EricC — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:37:05 GMT

Hello MOTODEV Studio users,

A new version of MOTODEV Studio for Android became available on Monday, February 28, 2011. This update provides support for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) SDK and includes version 10 of the Google ADT plugins.

A longer description of the update and how to install it is available on the MOTODEV discussion boards at http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/MOTODEV-Studio-for-Android/ANN-MOTODEV-Studio-2-1-1-is-available-Now-with-Honeycomb/td-p/12218

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio for Android.

Eric Cloninger

Product Line Manager

Motorola Mobility, Inc.

Honeycomb SDK 3.0 (Final) and ADT 10

EricC — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:14:44 GMT

Hello everyone,

On February 22, Google released the final Honeycomb 3.0 SDK along with new ADT plugins for Eclipse. We've tested these items and they appear to work correctly. News about the changes and instructions on how to work with them are in this thread at the MOTODEV Studio discussion boards.

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio.

Eric

A note on Android SDK 2.3.3 (API level 10)

EricC — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 02:35:53 GMT

Google released a new version of their SDK today for API level 10, targeting platform 2.3.3 (Gingerbread). There is a thread covering the topic at the MOTODEV discussion boards.

http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/MOTODEV-Studio-for-Android/Android-SDK-2-3-3-with-API-level-10-is-released/td-p/11620

ANN: MOTODEV Studio 2.1 is now available

EricC — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:09:39 GMT

Hello Everyone!

A new version of MOTODEV Studio for Android was released on 28 January 2011. This new release provides support for the Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) SDK and the Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) Preview SDK. MOTODEV Studio 2.1 ships with ADT plugins version 9, which have been renumbered by Google since the last major release.

A description of the release with a list of new features is available on the MOTODEV discussion boards. If you are planning to develop apps for the Honeycomb Preview SDK, please spend a few moments reading the known issues in the release notes. The installers are available at the MOTODEV Studio downloads page and you can update an existing version of MOTODEV Studio using the "Check for Updates" from the Help menu.

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio for Android.

Eric Cloninger

Product Line Manager

MOTODEV Studio, Your Way (A Tu Manera, Do Seu Jeito, 您喜欢的方式)

EricC — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:56:02 GMT

Did you know that MOTODEV Studio works in languages other than English? With only a few quick keystrokes, you can use your favorite development environment in Spanish, Portuguese, or Chinese.