Early Access Program

IntelliJ IDEA 13 Early Preview is Out

Today we have exciting news to share with all IntelliJ IDEA fans who eagerly wait for the new features to appear in their favorite IDE. Almost six months before the official release we are happy to announce the early preview of IntelliJ IDEA 13, codenamed Cardea, which scheduled for release in December of 2013.

We believe that making perfect tools for developers is only possible when listening to feedback from the community. That’s why we are very much looking to hear from everyone about IntelliJ IDEA 13.

Most of the new features in this preview are about Android development support, and cover the new functionality added in Android Studio. Of course, everyone will find something tailored especially to their needs:

Project Configuration

  • Support for importing the configuration of Android projects from build.gradle and building them through Gradle.

Code Editor

  • External annotations (nullability, @MagicConstant) for Android APIs.
  • Display of additional information (including drawable image) for drawable, dimension and string resources in the quick documentation view.
  • Support for gutter color annotations in Java files, as well as showing icon previews in the gutter of Java and XML files.
  • Folding of Android string resources in the Java editor to display the actual string value.
  • Support for running Android Lint checks on the fly in Java code.
  • Many new Lint checks.
  • Initial support for editing RenderScript code.

Layout Editor and Preview

  • Rendering performance improvements.
  • Support for multi-configuration layout preview.
  • Support for working with fragment resources.
  • Improved the UI for choosing device configurations.
  • Device frame rendering in the layout preview.
  • Double-clicking a component in the layout preview opens it in the layout editor.
  • Selection is synchronized between layout preview and editor.
  • Improved display of rendering errors with support for quickfixes.
  • Improved support for RelativeLayout.
  • Support for zooming and auto-zoom of views.
  • Additional selection actions in layout actions bar.
  • Support for control variations in the palette (e.g. multiple variations of TextField with different default settings).

Integrated Tools

  • Action to obtain a screenshot from the device.
  • Integrated 9-patch editor.
  • New UI for viewing the list of connected devices in the Android toolwindow.
  • Support for filtering by package name in logcat.

Also, if you want to take a look at the source code and the changes, we’ve opened a new repository browser for IntelliJ IDEA Community source code.

Feel free to share your feedback on our discussion forum and report bugs to the issue tracker.

Develop with Pleasure!

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