7 Things You Didn’t Know About Android Studio – That Experts Revealed

Android Developers, despite having the most sharp-edged sword in their hands, often use different Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for the app projects. Yes, Android Studio is the most powerful and well-equipped IDE that Android developers can utilize for their app development needs without looking elsewhere. Android Studio is more equipped than many other development environments in the market now – we take a look at 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Android Studio.

7 Things You Didn’t Know About Android Studio

Android Studio came with few subsequent updates to add more features and offer Android app projects’ best toolset. Android Studio also helps developers to manage their app projects in a highly organized and systematic manner without hitches. Android Studio offers a number of advanced features to ensure a better pace and ease of app development.

But since many Android developers are still in darkness about the Android Studio’s potential and strength, here we are going to elaborate on some less key aspects and less discussed attributes of this IDE that every Android developer should know.

Android Emulator for Fast-pacing App Performance

Android Studio now offers a new emulator that can offer around three times more processing speed through system CPU, RAM, and I/O in stark contrast to the emulator of the previous Android Studio version. As developers experienced, Android Studio is even faster in terms of performance than the system performance.

The new emulator also offers a better user interface and a range of sensor controls allowing exceptional ease of using various APKs for the app development purpose. You can carry our actions using multiple touches and can easily scale up and down the window as per preference.

Integrated Cloud Test Lab

With the latest Android Studio, developers get access to an Integrated Cloud Test Lab to help to test the app across multiple devices at one go and evaluate the performance and user experience.

The test lab uses the data centre of Google to test the app across a range of actual devices. This eases out the concerns over the app performance across multiple device platforms.

Integrates App Indexing

The all-new version of the Android Studio also helps developers utilize Google Search to boost their app’s visibility and discoverability. With the integrated app indexing API feature, the Android app developers and publishers can easily find the app in the Google Search.

Android Studio to help you achieve the best search output also offers a range of other attributes. Android Studio can help get the best URL structure to use in your app code to help with Google Search indexing. You can evaluate the code and indexing results to ensure optimum search results.

Autocomplete Selections Helping to Alter Values Easily

With Android Studio, you can use certain tricks to make your development process easier. For example, instead of inserting a fresh new tab for incorporating new values and methods, you can just tap on the tab to do the same. You can easily incorporate the autocomplete function with the easy shortcut CTRL-SPACE.

Since adding a new method through this shortcut can be a little annoying, you can just press on the TAB instead of entering the method. This helps in adding the method in place of the existing one quite easily.

Selecting Two Texts Simultaneously

While using Android Studio, you can use a different trick to make text selection easier. Though the common cursor options such as up, down, left, right, and a few tested and tried combinations of CTRL, SHIFT, and Fn takes care of the commonly needed navigation and selection choices, some developers found the trick of using ALT modifier for more efficient selection.

While working with Android Studio, you can use ALT-UP and ALT-DOWN to expand your selection and modify them more effectively. At the same time, ALT-SHIFT-UP and ALT-SHIFT-DOWN are also effective in moving the selection upward and downward. This would also help you to do away with the cumbersome cut and paste method.

Custom Object Rendering for Evaluating Expressions

Another important hidden trick for the Android Studio users is using custom object rendering for evaluating expressions. At the time of debugging code during runtime, you have different variables of the values to evaluate the code expressions. It is only effective if the objects appear. toString() values. To your dismay, this may not be effective at all for many other objects, particularly the collection of objects.

For dealing with the expression evaluation of a collection of objects, you often need to take every object separately, consuming too much time. To prevent this annoying thing, the developers can just build a custom renderer to evaluate expressions for any object type. All you need to do is to tap right on the object, choose “view as”, and then create. Lastly, just provide the details of the expression for rendering the objects the time of debugging.

Conclusion

Android Studio is the most popular IDE used by countless app projects. But still, many capabilities and tricks of this awesome tool remained unknown to the developers, and hence we thought to put together a few helpful tips and explain a few capabilities here. Hope you enjoyed our look at 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Android Studio.

Author bio

This was a guest post by Brian Walter, a senior app developer at We App IT – A mobile app development company offers various mobile app development services. He has 6+ years of experience in the IT industry, and hold expertise in android & iOS App Development. Apart from his professional life, he loves to create informative assets for people by writing blogs on different technologies.