So Google I/O kicked off today and I did the thing I always do on I/O keynote day, which is tell myself I'll just half-watch the stream in a background tab while I get real work done, and then three hours later I've done zero real work and I'm elbow deep in changelogs instead. Worth it, mostly.
Everyone's going to write about the big headline stuff today, so I'm not going to bother rehashing the whole keynote. Go read literally any other tech site for that. What I actually want to talk about is the thing that made me sit up straight in my chair: Android Studio.
If you've never built an Android app, you might not appreciate how genuinely bad the existing setup has been. The official way to build Android apps has, for years, meant Eclipse with the ADT plugin bolted on. Eclipse. In 2013. I say this as someone who has lost entire evenings to that IDE randomly forgetting how to index a project, or the layout editor just deciding it doesn't feel like rendering today. Its not that Eclipse is unusable, its that using it always felt like the tool was actively working against you instead of for you. I've got a half-finished side project (a dumb little app that tracks how many times I've refilled my water bottle, don't ask) that I've abandoned twice purely out of IDE-induced frustration.
So when they announced Android Studio was built on top of IntelliJ IDEA instead, I actually said "finally" out loud to an empty room, which is a little embarrassing to admit but there it is.
I downloaded the early access preview the second it went up and poked around for maybe twenty minutes before I had to get back to actual paying work. First impressions: its rough. Very rough. This is clearly a 0.1-type release and it shows — project import from an existing Eclipse setup is finicky, and I hit at least one crash just clicking around the layout preview. But the bones feel right in a way Eclipse never did. The live layout preview that updates as you edit XML is nice. The new Gradle-based build system underneath it is going to annoy a lot of people who don't want to learn yet another build tool, and honestly I get the complaint, but I think in six months nobody will miss ant builds.
I wouldn't tell anyone to switch their real projects over today. It's an early access build, not even beta, and Google's own docs say as much. But I think this is the actual correct move for Android tooling, and I'm mildly stunned it took this long. IntelliJ has been the better Java IDE for ages; anyone who's used both knows it.
The other thing from today that's worth a mention, mostly because it directly affects my wallet: Google Play Music now has an "All Access" subscription tier, basically their answer to Spotify and Rdio, $9.99 a month (or $7.99 if you sign up before the end of June, which, fine, I'll bite). I've been a Rdio person for about a year now mostly because the social features are genuinely good and I like seeing what friends are listening to. I doubt I switch, but I'll probably run the free trial just to see how the "blend your uploaded library with the streaming catalog" thing actually works in practice, since that's the one feature none of the other services do well. My uploaded library is a mess of MP3s ripped off CDs I bought in college, so if Google can cleanly merge that with a streaming catalog without me manually matching a thousand tracks, that's actually useful to me specifically, not just a marketing bullet point.
Anyway. Two more keynote-adjacent days of this to go, and I'm sure I'll have more to say once people start actually shipping apps built with the new IDE instead of just poking at the preview build like I did today. For now I've got a water-bottle-tracker app that's still broken in Eclipse, and now I'm tempted to try importing it into Studio just to see how badly it goes.