IntelliJ brings back my interest in Android

Eclipse sucks!

Sorry to all Eclipse lovers, I just hate developing in Eclipse. Coming from Visual Studio and XCode, I just felt that eclipse was not responsive enough for Android development. I started my research for a good alternative. I even contemplated building everything manually using TextMate. But I think I finally found some good Android development tool that does not suck. Its IntelliJ IDEA and I use their free community edition. IDEA can open your eclipse projects and works seamlessly with Android emulator.

Downloading:

Download IntelliJ IDEA community edition from http://www.jetbrains.com and install it on your platform. The rest of the post is for Mac OSX Lion. But it should be similar for others platforms.

Setting Up:

First thing you would do is download the android SDK and install some where. I put mine @

/Users/gavi/work/android-sdk-mac

Add the android path in your profile. Edit your .bash_profile

vi ~/.bash_profile

Add SDK tools paths

export PATH=$PATH:/Users/gavi/work/android-sdk-mac/platform-tools:/Users/gavi/work/android-sdk-mac/tools

Save the file and execute

source ~/.bash_profile
android

Then you can download the necessary SDKs you need(Android 2.3.3, ICS etc). Here is a screen shot.

Once your sdk is setup. Start up IntelliJ

The first thing you want to do is setup your Java SDK. On Mac, The path is similar to below

/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home

Then you can add Android SDKs. Here is a quick video I recorded which makes it simple.

Setting Up IntelliJ SDKs for Android from ObjectGraph LLC on Vimeo.

Thats it. Just have fun developing for Andorid!