We're alive

Today I commited a nice patch improving handling of testing projects and fixed dialog selecting target device to show available AVDs in a scroll pane. In addition to that our new build will contain a change that makes it compatible with vanilla installation of NetBeans 6.9.

Thanks for the patches a bug reports.

Resource references

Yet another missing part of XML editing support is added now. NBAndroid plugin now reads content of generated R.java file and offers its elements when editing an attribute value that contains reference. This poses some limitations (no system wide resources yet and the project must be built to get recent additions) though it is better than no support.  

This was much simpler for me thanks to great advises how to use Java sources support.

Another shot at XML editor support

I made a couple of changes in XML editing support yesterday when I arrived to Antwerp for Devoxx. They fix some annoying mistakes like android:id or android:layout_width attributes often missing in code completion when editing layouts. The change was just pushed to our Auto Update. Enjoy it.

NBAndroid is heading to Devoxx

I am heading to Devoxx in Antwerp, Belgium next week - November 14-18. There is a good number of sessions about Android including some related to tools. Those include

• Android Tools in Action
• Android Development Tools
• Android Tools BOF

If you want to meet, discuss something, or just say "hi", sent a note and we can arrange something. Pinging @nb_android Twitter account can be the simplest way how to contact me and let others know. There are some other means on contacts page too.

How to attach sources for SDK classes?

Ability to see SDK sources was one of the requests files in our JIRA for a while. I am glad to announce that is ready now. You have to find these sources somewhere because Android SDK does not ship with them. For example Mike Foster wrote a script long ago. The idea is to clone git repository with Android sources and collect the sources from various locations there. Once you have it extract them into $ANDROID_SDK/platforms/<platform-dir>/sources folder where platform is one of android-X directories. Substitute API level of your project for X.

For those interested in details there is a long discussion in related bug report from Eclipse users.

Synch with latest Android SDK

The latest updates of Android SDK tools (r14 and quickly following r15) brought some significant changes. Those had to be reflected in our plugin and the change is alive now.

Please take a careful look at SDK Tools page. Your projects need to be updated using android update project command. As a result you will see that build.properties and default.properties files are replaced with ant.properties and project.properties. The plugin will run this update if you open the project customizer (right on project node and select Properties menu item) close it with OK. More significant changes are under the hood. Android team reworked the way how projects are build. The build should be much faster especially if you use Android library projects. And while Xav admits that the old implementation of libraries was fragile in Eclipse I can add that it was not great for NetBeans either. Our concerns are gone now and updated version is nicer.

Bugfixes pushed continually

There were several reports of problems with initialization of Android plugin in NetBeans BugZilla. Thanks to our friends in NetBeans team an email about this ended in my mailbox. Fix is on the way to the update center.
The problem affected people who (re)moved Adroid SDK from a location specified in NetBeans. While the original code was OK in the past there was a small change in SDK libraries (RuntimeException is thrown where IllegalArgumentException was used). It is covered with a test now to avoid surprises like this.

Did I write that the only way how to convince to contribute larger chunks of functionality again is to sent a donation? I like it that there are 10.000+ downloads but this doesn't justify my time spent on this. Keep in mind that Eclipse plugin is developed by Googlers and we do not have any sponsor like this.