Android IDE: Eclipse or Motodev or Tegra Android Development Pack?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9993204

  •  28-05-2021
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Question

I am more comfortable with Visual Studio with C#, so I hope to get an IDE that is convenient. During my search for free android development IDE, apart from the usual Eclipse, IntelliJ, netbeans. I have also found these:

nVidia Tegra Android Development Pack, which is kind of Eclipse. "Setting up an Android development environment can be a complex and frustrating experience. NVIDIA simplifies this for all Android developers with a single installer that manages this complexity for you."

Motorola MOTODEV, which is also Eclipse. "Based on Eclipse, MOTODEV Studio lets developers who are new to Android get started quickly and helps experienced developers get the job done even faster"

It's like I am exactly their targeting demographics.

My first question is, are there more pack like the nVidia or the Motorola one?

My second question is, should I setup Eclipse as instructed by Google's developer page or should I use the nVidia pack or the Motorola thing. (Or that I should use IntelliJ or netbeans?)

Was it helpful?

Solution

I'll chime in, but first a disclaimer, I am the Product Manager for MOTODEV Studio. I'll try not to market at you, especially since it's a free product. ;-)

I would love to have you for a user, but I really want to see you as a happy developer, no matter what tools you use. @Ollie has it right, find tools that you like and use them.

We try to be the good starter package for people who don't know Eclipse. There's a lot of setup with the Android SDK, ADT, and the platforms. For some, getting the tools set up can be confusing. We know where everything goes, so we try to uncomplicate it as much as we can.

We also try to add things that make life better for developers than just an installer. I won't enumerate, but go to the MOTODEV page and if you see what you like, try it out. It works for any Android device, not just a Motorola.

If you have questions, you can ask here (tag MOTODEV) or on our boards.

OTHER TIPS

Motodev is cancelled by Google in November - you cannot download it from Motorola web-site, only from users' backups and copies. Thus I wouldn't recommend using it to any professional developer.

Netbeans doesn't have official support for Android yet - you may develop for Android using plugins, but it's quite risky if a plugin's maintainer retires.

IntelliJ lacks jni support. At least I couldn't find it while briefly inspecting capabilities.

So it looks like Eclipse now is the only reasonable choice for full-scale android development.

Alternatively you may use Visual Studio 2010+ with http://code.google.com/p/vs-android/ for native android development. Since Android v.4.0 it supports native Activities, thus you may even try to develop the whole application in C/C++

It's a personal preference.

Many people use Eclipse, many people use IntelliJ. I use IntelliJ and I find it much better, but others may say the same about Eclipse.

This is a very subjective question, and it will yield many subjective answers. But here is mine:

I find that using Eclipse with ADT plugins is very convenient.

  • Both the Eclipse IDE and ADT plugins are updated regularly, so bugs are quickly squashed and new features are introduced
  • Eclipse has a huge user base, so it is quite easy to find answers
  • Branded or customized IDE tends to fall behind in terms of bug fixes and such

If you are doing generic android development, you should go for a clean Eclipse IDE (my subjective preference), or if you are doing Tegra only development it is probably wise to go for nVidia Tegra Android Development Pack.

I think that the pure Eclipse solution is better. Just based on the simple fact that t is the most widely used, and you will have an much bigger pool of resources to get help from when needed.
I briefly used the MOTODEV solution, but went back to pure Eclipse, because it didn't bring much of additional value. But in the end it boils down to personal preference. IntelliJ felt for me much slicker and closer to Visual Studio, but again I fell back to Eclipse.

I came across this thread while searching for some Eclipse links on Goog. I realize it's pretty old but in case others are looking for Android development IDE's I thought I'd post.

I work at NVIDIA in the Tegra team and work with a lot of Android developers - especially Android game developers who often use Windows on their dev machines. As part of our work, we created a plugin for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012 called Nsight Tegra. Using Nsight Tegra you can develop (and debug!!) Java and native/C++ Android applications from the comfort of VS. Very handy :)

NVIDIA also has a CPU and GPU profiler. The GPU profiler is especially handy for Android game developers wanting to understand the bottlenecks in their 3D pipeline or to try out different performance optimizations.

Anyway, the tools are free so check them out!

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