October 12, 2022

Android Studio - first steps

I just type "studio" at the command line on my Fedora system to start it up. I am following the first tutorial. It will save to /home/tom/AndroidStudioProjects. Note that I have /home/tom/Android with a bunch of old Eclipse based Java projects. The progress bar/status line is at the bottom of the GUI.

When I click Finish it does do a lot of stuff and takes a long time. It talks about Gradle, whatever that is. (It is some kind of build automation tool). I hide the "what's new" panel. It wants to do something about updating to new Kotlin style -- I say yes.

I dismiss a message about increasing the heap size and now the status line is blank and nothing seems like the tutorial is telling me. I restart studio and it takes me to the same place. The GUI is snappy, I'll say that for it.

I use New to start a new project and try it all again, but this time I won't dismiss the notice about wanting the increase the heap size. I'll just wait and see what happens. It goes much faster the second time (apparently things got done the first time that don't need to be repeated). This does nothing differently and is just a pointless exercise. So I get lost in section (3) "Create a project using the template".

The Kotlin tutorial advises me I need to be using Android Studio 3.6 or higher. I see no such version number in what I am running (it simply identifies itself as 2021.3.1). I'll presume that this is far beyond 3.6 and that they have now adopted an entirely different version number scheme. Never mind this tutorial for now.

Well, it is annoying that both of these demos have falled out of sync with the software actually being distributed. Not only that, but they boast of being updated less than a month ago. Clearly the update did not involve checking the tutorials against the current software release.

Forge boldly ahead

My android studio shows MainActivity.kt in the central/right pane. Some kind of pane is to the left which seems to be some kind of file explorer gadget, this apparently is the "Project" tab. I pass up the confusing instructions at the end of (3) and in (4) "Find project files", things do make sense. In (5) I find myself looking at the same code they describe in my central pane, but I don't have a "design pane" with green arrows in a circle to rebuild the DefaultPreview. I can click on "View" -- "Tool Windows" and get the project tab back if it goes away.

Apparently the UI has been changed and the design tab is either deprecated or gone altogether. The "new scheme" is discussed in the following link. Apparently the "layout editor" replaces the design tab.

Video tutorials

Chatting with Dave via email about the miserable state of the Android Studio tutorials I was trying to work with, he agreed and sympathized. He suggested searching for video tutorials that were clearly labeled "2022", so I am giving that a try: Tutorial (1) has a fellow with a definite accent. Not impossible to understand, but requiring close attention.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]