As part of the Android Dev Summit, Google has presented the first preview of what will be the next version of AndroidStudio 4.0. With which interested developers can now download the integrated development environment in a "Canary" version.
The new IDE comes with a number of other enhancements, including a completely new user interface creation technology called Jetpack Compose UI presented at this year's I / O conference. Compose greatly simplifies and accelerates the creation of user interfaces in Android applications. For developers, this means less writing to create the same interface in their programs than they can write directly to related resources, although they can see the future appearance of the user interface live and in development and design.
Main new features of Android Studio 4.0 Canary
jetpack now too includes support for CameraX, It works with the camera software of many Android smartphones. As a result, it should take less effort to write code that works with many smartphone cameras.
In addition to Compose, Android Studio 4.0 now supports the use of multiple Java 8 APIs without the need for a minimum level of API for your application.
Through a process called desugaring, the DEX D8 compiler in Android Studio 3.0 and later already provided substantial support for Java 8 language features (such as lambda expressions, default interface methods, resources, etc.).
In Android Studio 4.0, the desugaring engine has been extended to allow uninstallation of the Java language APIs. This means that you can now include standard language APIs, available only in the latest versions of Android (such as java.util.streams), in applications that support older versions of Android.
Another feature that stands out is that text editor supports syntax highlighting, code completion, and error checking for Proguard Rules files.
In addition, Android Studio 4.0 now includes live templates for Kotlin classes. The feature and instant add-ons for the app have been completely removed. Instead, developers should use the dynamic features plugin and therefore the app bundles.
Android Gradle plugin now supports Kotlin DSL build script files (* .kts). When used with Android Studio, some IDE features, such as the Project Structure dialog and scripting fixes, now also support reading and writing to script files.
In previous versions of the Android Gradle plugin, all dynamic function modules could only depend on the base module of the application.
When you use the plugin Gradle 4.0.0 for Android can now include a feature pack that is dependent on another module. So a feature: the video can depend on the functionality: camera, which depends on the base module, as shown in the figure below.
This means that when your application requests to download a dynamic function module, it also downloads the other function modules on which it depends.
After creating dynamic feature packs for your application, you can declare a feature dependency feature in the module's build.gradle file.
Android Studio 4.0 now includes a visual layout editor for the MotionLayout layout type, making it easy to create and preview animations.
motioneditor provides a simple interface to manipulate elements of the MotionLayout library which serves as the basis for animation in Android applications. In previous versions, creating and editing these items required manual editing of the constraints in the XML resource files.
If you want to know more about the news of this release, you can check the details in the following link
Download and test Android Studio 4.0 Canary
For those who are interested in being able to try this previous version of Android Studio 4.0. You can download the Canary version from the official website of the project.