I think you have this backwards. Completely backwards. First, neither the Eclipse IDE, nor the Android plugin for Eclipse, are really "developed by the community". While they may accept community contributions, the main developers in are paid professionals.
Second, if the Android paid professionals had to develop, not only the Android portion, but also the Java portion, and the basic IDE editing framework, and the XML portion, and the build portion -- well, the result would be -- no IDE at all. NOT a better IDE. And finally, having used IDE tools for other languages as well, I can tell you that Eclipse in most cases wins the comparison, if you compare Java (or J#). But no tool wins every comparison! But: If you are programming in C++, well, Eclipse is weak in C++. But Visual Studio is weak in C++, just less so. C++ has many issues that make it hard to create a good IDE for. Include files and the preprocessor, for two examples. But for Java, Eclipse really shines. There's a bug, with workarounds, that makes the completion slow for some people -- but not unusably slow, unless you try to run it on an underpowered machine. I've complained about the XML layout formatting myself, but that is a very narrow issue, and is being fixed, and of course, you can give a command to reformat. It's an annoyance, true, as the reformatting command isn't as nice as my manual formatting! But hardly a deal- breaker. If you're finding Eclipse and ADT to be barely useful, I would look at learning the tools better. I think it would really help if there were a better way to do so! Pair programming with someone who knows how to use them well would be ideal, but often impractical. I haven't investigated whether there are training classes available specifically for the tools, but perhaps taking an Android training class would cover it? Failing that, just taking the time to work through the documentation that exists, and the examples, and exploring the tools available, will be time well spent. Without that, you'll find it is a chore to develop in ANY new language or IDE. It always is, at first, but after a while, you learn strategies for learning a new language or IDE, and that helps shorten the period considerably. Tomorrow I re-learn Visual Studio, after having not used it much over the past few years. I'm not looking forward to it, but I know I'll be OK. On Jan 7, 7:01 pm, indigo0086 <indigo0...@gmail.com> wrote: > I mean right now it's the only IDE for developing for android > "efficiently". I'm just finding that eclipse and adt are just barely > usable tools for android development (more eclipse than ADT of > course). I've read where a few android developers have complained > that the tools have poor usability, are slow, and are just not > visually pleasing to use. I can site the android layout editor > horribly formats xml, and eclipse doesn't automatically format it when > switching to xml edit view. I think we need official tools solely for > android development instead of a plugin for an ide developed by the > community (none of which seem to be user experience experts either). > I just feel like it's a chore to develop in java as opposed to in > other languages mainly because of the ide tools available. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
