It's hard to deny that Android Studio has been a big hit since its announcement at Google I/O this year, and despite the "Early Preview" moniker, developers have been flocking to it. Yesterday afternoon, version 0.2.0 was announced through the Android Developers account on Google+. The new version brings several bug fixes and updates to the IntelliJ IDE, Lint, Gradle, templates, layout rendering, and more. While the list of new features is relatively sparse, what has been added it pretty cool. An update to the Android Gradle plug-in brings the version up to 0.5.0, and now includes very early support for parallel builds, a feature that made Facebook's Buck build toolappealing. The layout editor and preview windows also include a new screenshot feature that will help in speeding up design work and creating samples of existing projects.
When the new version was first announced, patching version 0.1.9 to 0.2 was not supported due to changes in the way some content was bundled. However, that requirement has since been dropped and checking for an update with the built-in mechanism works like normal. Be advised, there are still some reported complications with updating through the patching method, so read the troubleshooting section or just go straight to reinstalling with the new version. Once you're up and running, you may want to enable Gradle's parallel build feature. Since this capability is in "incubation," it is not turned on by default. To speed up your compilation, just go to Preferences ->Compiler and check the box for "Compile independent modules in parallel."
Unfortunately, there are a couple of small breaking changes that come along with the included update to the Gradle plug-in. Don't worry, they are easily fixed. The new version is not technically backwards compatible with 0.4, but the only change we have to make is a bump to the version number in our project's main build script. As soon as an outdated project is opened, a warning bubble appears with a link to "Search in build.gradle files". Click on the link and open any files listed, then change the Gradle dependency from '0.4' with '0.5.+', and finally rebuild the project.
Other issues are being reported with varying degrees of frequency, so check the Android Tools Project Site and the Android Studio page on the Android Developer site if you experience any other errors from the upgrade.
Despite a few early growing pains, Android Studio is already off to a great start and improving quickly!
[Announcement, Project Site]
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