Android UI Designer Coming in IntelliJ IDEA 12
June 26th, 2012 by Andrey CheptsovToday we have exciting news for all Android developers who use IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate or IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition as their IDE of choice — Android UI Designer, one of the most desired features, is finally coming with the release of IntelliJ IDEA 12.
Once IntelliJ IDEA 12 EAP opens later this week, you can start playing with it. Those who want to get it sooner may build IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition from the source code right now.
Here we would like to highlight the major features of Android UI Designer you will get with the new release:
- Adding new component to Canvas or Component Tree with one click.
- Move, Delete, Copy and Paste operations within Canvas and Component Tree.
- Powerful Properties Editor allows editing any number of selected components. You can also hide unimportant properties.
- Component Tree, which shows the hierarchy of components.
- Component Palette with all the components supported by Android SDK.
- Support of all possible UI layouts, FrameLayout, LinearLayout, GridLayout, etc.
- Support of resources in Properties Editor.
- Instant switching between multiple device profiles.
Watch this short overview of Android UI Designer in action:
As you may know, Google I/O 2012 is about to start on 27th of June in San-Francisco. We are happy to be invited to participate in Google I/O Developer Sandbox this year, to present the new features to Android developers. We hope you will join us on the conference to see the demos, ask questions and share your feedback with us and other developers.
Stay tuned!
IntelliJ IDEA Team
June 26th, 2012 at 8:24 am
Awesome! Thank you for providing us, the Android devs, an alternative to Eclipse!!
June 26th, 2012 at 8:34 am
Great! I have been waiting for this a long time.
June 26th, 2012 at 8:43 am
Yeah! I’ve been waiting for this
Keep up the great work!
June 26th, 2012 at 9:02 am
Great news
Now I use IDEA for Android development. UI Designer will be very useful.
June 26th, 2012 at 9:03 am
This is awesome !!! Much much better than the existing one… great job guys.
June 26th, 2012 at 9:15 am
Great Job!
June 26th, 2012 at 10:10 am
Awesome we’ll see you guys at #io12!
June 26th, 2012 at 10:59 am
Fantastic news!
).
Good to see that even if IntelliJ products improve towards coding, UI designers are not totally out of scope (probably they just need to be done right, like jFormDesigner
June 26th, 2012 at 5:57 pm
Nice! Is there work being done on SDK-17-style library projects? The only reason I can’t use IDEA is that it won’t recognize our shared common Android library.
June 26th, 2012 at 7:06 pm
Great. What tag do you suggest building from?
June 26th, 2012 at 8:11 pm
Awesome!!
Is UI Designer support android.support.v7.widget.GridLayout too?
June 26th, 2012 at 10:18 pm
I’ve been using IntelliJ for about 7 years for our desktop Java applications. A little over a year ago when we started on our iPad app you came out with AppCode so I still had all my familiar tools for objective-c development. Now that we are looking to take our app to android you become the best tool in that space too. You guys are simply amazing!
June 27th, 2012 at 9:02 am
Does anyone know how to build the “source code” download from IntelliJ IDEA Community? I really want to UI Designer soon!!
June 27th, 2012 at 1:23 pm
It looks promising.
June 27th, 2012 at 6:18 pm
Really amazing stuff.
Suggestion:
Can the layout allow for both Design and Text to be shown at the same time rather than toggling between the tabs. This is really very useful for quick fine adjustment using Text and vice-versa. Screen estate may be a consideration but most developments are done with least 23 inch external monitor nowsaday. Or maybe make the Text panel dockable…
June 28th, 2012 at 12:51 am
Sweet. However, don’t take away the current XML->LayoutPreview. I really love the way it is; when one updates the XML and immediately see the changes. Having to swap tabs as in Eclipse, would be a large step back.
Minor things to improve with the preview are:
* Support for color edits in each color oriented attribute, similar as currently for color resources.
* Support for working with list-item layouts (and others such as dialogs/toasts/…). Now, it’s rather quirky to create a special layout for the purpose and it still expands.
* Support for tie a list-view to a list-item-layout and populate it with random data. That would enhance designs with list-views a lot.
* Support for rendering custom view classes.
June 28th, 2012 at 4:02 am
Macdevign, this is already possible now. You can use action Split Vertically or Horizontally on the layout file editor tab, and then open the new editor tab in Text mode.
July 1st, 2012 at 11:06 am
It also seems that intelliJ cannot deploy and launch an android project with the last version of the Android SDK. I’ve tried with the last 11.1.2 stable release. The 11.1.3 EAP and the Leda EAP.
There is no error message and the logcat console works as usual however I cannot deploy, run or debug any application (I’ve tried on Nexus One & Nexus S).
I do not have this problem on either eclipse Indigo or eclipse Juno with the ADT plugin.
July 1st, 2012 at 5:33 pm
http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-88118
July 2nd, 2012 at 2:39 am
That’s great and not at all too soon *ahem*! 80% of Android dev time is spent on trial-n-error GUI code. Now, for the 10% spent on other resource and configuration stuff I’d welcome any improvements to maximize time spent on real coding =).
July 2nd, 2012 at 1:18 pm
Awe some .Cannot wait to download it
July 8th, 2012 at 9:06 am
How can I switch the default to XML->LayoutPreview? Instead of the Desgin tab I would like to have the Text tab.
July 9th, 2012 at 4:34 am
I use IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition as my IDE,, n m very excited by the release of IntelliJ IDEA 12 with an advance feature, Android UI Designer;
Thanx for the news……….
http://www.expertsfromindia.com/hire_android_application_developer_programmer.htm
July 11th, 2012 at 11:18 am
> Macdevign, this is already possible now. You can use action Split Vertically or Horizontally on the layout file editor tab, and then open the new editor tab in Text mode.
No, this is not working. When I edit text this way, preview does not get synchronized. Moreover if there are several resources, one needs to do too many extra actions like opening file twice and switching mode.
Moreover, developers prefer keyboard, not mouse, therefore most productive devs will not use UI designer anyway. It is good for marketing purposes though or for designers (doubtful). Therefore, you have just removed one feature from IDEA for those devs.
July 19th, 2012 at 9:17 am
I was reading a french magazine “Programmez!”(n°154) containing an article about Intellij Idea CE 11 and saying that is near an alternative to Eclipse…well it’s already done isn’t it ;-). (yes i know it is actualy ‘eap’ but it’s really great !)….in short i’m happy
Thanks a lot !
August 28th, 2012 at 3:19 pm
Awesome. I use IntelliJ as my IDE. Have been using other popular IDEs, but always IntelliJ beats them all. Love the Android UI Designer feature. Thanks
September 8th, 2012 at 1:38 am
Waiting for this for a long time … thx to JB
September 19th, 2012 at 1:37 am
Yes Quite
September 24th, 2012 at 5:21 pm
Really great
Can anybody tell me when JetBrain plans to release new version of IntelliJ?
September 28th, 2012 at 1:00 am
when add a Switch,design will error.
October 2nd, 2012 at 11:48 pm
How to change the scale in the Design?
October 3rd, 2012 at 10:18 am
Awesome guys!
This supports Fragments too, does it?
October 17th, 2012 at 8:00 pm
When is the estimated release date?
November 9th, 2012 at 4:47 am
Amazing. You guys have been doing great job ! Congrats!
November 16th, 2012 at 6:21 am
Hi,
I’m a huge fan of the Android UI Designer!!! Thanks!!!…but there might be bug…with TabHost. When you have a tabhost you can only select the first tab to add the elements to. the rest of the tabs are in-accessible via the visual designer…i’m aware this is a developer preview..but yeah. Please fix it
November 19th, 2012 at 7:33 am
Wow, this is at least twice as good as Google’s version. I have no idea why they keep using Eclipse; it’s intolerably slow and over-complicated.
November 20th, 2012 at 6:25 am
just installed leda eap for mac so how exactle do i access ui designer after my activity opens in text window?
November 30th, 2012 at 12:13 pm
Hi,
to Thuita Wachira: http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-96301
December 6th, 2012 at 2:41 pm
Great Job!!!
December 6th, 2012 at 8:22 pm
Awesome! You make my year!
December 7th, 2012 at 12:47 am
awesome!
December 8th, 2012 at 12:03 am
The new Intellij IDEA is AWESOME! BUT, IT’S MISSING SOMETHING VERY VERY IMPORTANT….the “Force Regenerate R file” when you right click the project folders and files, the context to force regenerate R was always an option in the previous versions. It’s not in the new one and it’s ALREADY causing me problems lol. I NEED the regen BACK PLEASE!! Other than that it’s truly the best Android compiler and designer available to the public right now by a long long long loooooooooooooooooooooong shot!! Lol
December 11th, 2012 at 9:20 pm
I have the same requirement with Mike Kraus’s. I use Idea to develop Android applications under Android source tree environment. I use the build script brought by Android souce to compile the app. Because the build script will generate a R when compiling, the Idea’s auto generated R becomes redundant and causes the compilation to fail.
December 17th, 2012 at 7:46 am
THAT IS SIMPLY GREAT!
THANK YOU JETBRAINS
December 20th, 2012 at 3:21 am
I am a fan of this IDE for android development. Be it windows or Ubuntu…
I believe the only thing for this IDE to be an official Linux IDE is good gtk, c/vala support (which I understand can’t happen because of not being a viable business model).
But even without, this is simply above all IDEs.
December 24th, 2012 at 5:35 am
Can I use UI Designer for GWT ui.xml files?
if Yes how to open UI Designer window for that? can nof found
December 24th, 2012 at 7:59 am
Dmitri,
IntelliJ IDEA does not include a visual designer for GWT.
January 12th, 2013 at 8:40 pm
How do you open the UI Designer in intellij 12 on Windows 7? I’ve tried following the video (mac), but the class name doesn’t light up.
January 29th, 2013 at 12:27 pm
I am not sure if IDEA has added feature for implementing non-blocking UI in Android applications where most of the beginners fail. I think IDE should give some kind of warning there is a potential for blocking-UI due to tasks like network connections.
February 20th, 2013 at 11:01 am
Another great product from JetBrains! Thank you!
April 17th, 2013 at 3:30 am
IDEA 12.1.1 not have UI Designer(((