Electric Eel is now available on the stable channel. I have been using the preview version for a while and it has some really cool features. Let’s look at some of them.
New Logcat
This feature was already available in Dolphin via opt-in, but it has been added by default in Electric Eel. This feature gives us a lot of flexibility to query and parse application logs.
It has an intelligent search with auto-complete to filter out logs.e.g. we can filter by messages or tags in the logs
We can also configure the formatting using Standard or Compact View, which helps us view the information we want.
This can also be customized to view specific information in the logs.
These may look trivial but help greatly while analyzing complex logs or finding the root cause of a non-reproducible bug.
Build Analyzer & Upgrade Assitant
Build Analyzer summarizes the time spent downloading dependencies and also gives a detailed view of downloads per dependency. This helps us to determine, which unexpected downloads are negatively impacting our build speed.
The Upgrade Assistant helps us to upgrade our projects easily. If the project sync fails after the upgrade, it gives us an easy option to revert the upgrade. This can undo changes from all the affected files and saves us from gradle nightmares.
SDK Insights
Android Studio now highlights if the latest version of any dependent SDK is available. We can easily see this in build.gradle file. The Project Structure dialog also shows the same warning.
Emulators & Devices
While creating emulators, we now have a new option of Desktop to emulate devices like Chromebooks. This can help us to test free-form resizing and minimizing of apps on such devices.
The coolest feature is Resizable Emulator. This helps us to test our apps on different device sizes without creating separate emulators for each configuration. The display mode menu can be used to switch between different configurations.
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Device Mirroring
We can also mirror our physical device to Android Studio and interact with it similarly to an emulator. This is an opt-in feature in Electric Eel and can be done through Settings. Once the device is connected via ADB, it will show in the running devices panel. We can now work with a device similar to an emulator, including dragging and dropping a file.
App Quality Insights
This is by far the most useful feature because it lets us analyse crash data from Firebase directly in Android Studio.
We need to log in inside Android Studio using Firebase credentials.
Once done, we can observe the latest crashes, and filter by device configurations, Android versions etc. Most importantly, we can directly navigate to the relevant file from the crash logs.
The gutter icon in the source file also shows the line number from where we can see the associated crashes and their details.
Design Tools & Previews
For Compose Previews, we can now specify the device parameter of the Preview annotation in order to define configurations for Composables in different devices.
For more information, refer https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose/tooling/studio#different-devices
Starting with Electric Eel, we can now see the immediate effect of code changes in Composable Preview.
Refer to the following link for more information
https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose/tooling/studio#preview
There is also something for those using XML layout. Visual Lint is automatically run in order to understand the problems in different device configurations. This can be seen in the Layout Validation window. The Problem panel highlights all the problems.
These are all the cool new features of Electric Eel. Now it’s all the easier to view the new features using the Help-> What’s new in Android Studio section.
Do make the best use of all these features and don’t forget to check out the preview version of Android Studio Flamingo.
References:
This article was previously posted on proandroiddev.com
