Eric Cloninger

Some guy continuously making messes and cleaning them up again

NOTE: This blog post was originally hosted on the Motorola Developers (MOTODEV). site. That site is no longer online. I’ve made every attempt to preserve the original content with only formatting changes to fit this site.

Hello MOTODEV Studio users,

An new version of MOTODEV Studio for Android is available yesterday, 22 March 2010. Thisnew release provides support for the Android 2.1 (Eclair) SDK and includes version 0.9.6 of the Google ADT plugins. We’ve added many new features for this release, including the ability to install into your own Eclipse environment, 64-bit host support, Windows 7 support, as well as a large number of great improvements to existing features. We’re very happy with this new release and we hope you will be as well.

A longer description of the update and how to install it is available on the MOTODEV discussion boards at http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/MOTODEV-Studio-for-Android/ANN-MOTODEV-Studio-1-2-is-now-…

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio for Android.

Eric Cloninger

Sr. Product Manager

>>>> Content of Discussion Board Post <<<<

Hello Everyone,

I’m attending the EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara this week and this is also the week of CTIA in Las Vegas. There is a lot of excitement around mobile applications and we’re spending a lot of time at these events interacting with mobile developers. At these events, we’re talking a lot about the developer ecosystem (that’s you) and so it pleases me greatly to announce that MOTODEV Studio 1.2 is now available for download.

MOTODEV Studio for Android 1.2 supports the Android 2.1 SDK and includes the ADT 0.9.6 plugins. Release notes, installation instructions, and the installer are available on the MOTODEV download site.

There is a lot of cool stuff in MOTODEV Studio this time and you will have to read through the install guide, release notes and online help to get the full story, but here are some highlights:

Install MOTODEV Studio into your own Eclipse environment. You’ve been asking for this and we’ve listened. You can point your existing Eclipse installation at our update site and install the MOTODEV plugins directly into your own version of Eclipse Galileo. There are some caveats, so you will need to read the install guide carefully. As this is a new feature and the number of permutations out there are endless, we’re going to ask that you work with us to resolve any problems and be patient. At the moment, you must use the update site to install the plugins. We’re working to get the plugins into a downloadable archive, but we didn’t have time to properly test that for our release date. We’ll make a separate announcement when a downloadable archive is available.

  • 64-bit installers. Another popular request from our users is now available. When you go to the download page for MOTODEV Studio, you will now be given a choice of 32-bit and 64-bit installers. 64-bit packages are also available on the update site, so make sure you choose the correct one for your system.
  • Develop your way. We’ve tested MOTODEV Studio against 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows XP, Windows 7, Mac OS (Leopard and Snow Leopard), Ubuntu 9.x, and Fedora 11. Other host combinations may work, but if one does not, your best option is to try one of the OSes that we’ve tested.
  • New emulator view options. We’ve added a much faster way to display the emulator view (on Windows and Linux) and cleaned up the confusion about how to use MOTODEV Studio with the external emulator. This new feature uses native graphic calls instead of relying on VNC running as a process in the emulator, although VNC is still available as an option if you run into problems.
  • Device Manager improvements. The Device Manager view now shows the target for all connected devices and AVDs. We’ve also cleaned up the UI a bit to get rid of the buttons that used a lot of real estate. Those buttons are now available as context menu items for each device in the view. Another useful new feature of the Device Manager view is that you can take screenshots of a device or a running emulator without having to bring up the DDMS perspective.
  • Support for Motorola Android handsets. MOTODEV Studio is tested with every new Motorola handset that goes into the market, so you know that you can test your application when new phones are available.
  • Localization editor. We’ve done some exciting work in the localization editor and we think it’s going to make your localization task much simpler. We’ve added support for multiple line strings, styled text, and we now preserve embedded XML comments in the source file. But the most exciting thing is…
  • Automated translation of strings using Google Translate. With this feature, you can take an entire set of strings and choose to translate them to another language. In a matter of minutes, you can have your app running in a new language. How cool is that? But, please, exercise some restaint and caution when using this feature. The last thing we all want is for your great idea becoming the next “All your base are belong to us” joke because of a poor translation. Get a native speaker to approve your app before submitting it to the market.
  • The development team has worked hard the last few months to get all these great new features created and tested and the docs team has done a great job of putting the instructions into a clear and readable style. We hope that you use these tools and they make your development task a lot easier. I would love to be able to say that this release has zero problems, but there will always be things that don’t work for people. If you find a problem, let us know on these discussion boards. We’ll do our best to work with you to resolve problems.

There are some known issues with the release. We’ve documented them as best we can, with workarounds where we’ve found them. If you read nothing else (besides the install guide), please look at the known issues before posting your bug reports. It could be that we’ve already identified the problem and have a workaround.

If you have any problems with the update or other questions or comments about MOTODEV Studio for Android, please post your feedback in the MOTODEV Studio Discussion board.

Thank you for using MOTODEV Studio for Android.

Eric Cloninger

Product Line Manager

Eclipse Sequoyah Project Lead

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