Android 2.3 Gingerbread SDK review and bugs

It's been over a week since gingerbread came out, i've been using the updated sdk since day one.

Here is a little review about it from the developers point of view (it's not as sweet as the name suggests...).

Adb is moved to /platform-tools directory from /tools.

SDK 2.3 is not backwards compatible with older ubuntu's because GLIBC_2.11 is only available in newer distributions.


Some guy found a workaround:

> Just found a work-around solution:

> 1. Add this repository: "deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid-
> security main" to software sources (/etc/apt/sources.list)

> 2. Start update aptitude: sudo apt-get update

> 3. Start update libc6: sudo apt-get install libc6

When I tried this, on my ubuntu (9.10) laptop, it wanted to remove +2,5Gb of random packages that used the old version of glibc (gnome etc..). So after I made a fresh install of ubuntu 10.10, it worked like it should. A few months ago I had to move back from 10.10 to 9.x because eclipse and the sdk wouldn't work well..now it's the other way around.

The new layout editor:

You used to be able to just put layout items into (empty wrap_content sized) layouts. Now you can't use the editor for that, you have to switch to xml view and do it by hand.

The small icons on the outline window are gone. You can't delete or move an item with a click of a button.
The highlight around the items is a sweet addon, and it's good that you can move around already deployed items in the editor by dragging them.

ADB and SDK manager:

3rd party addons are now available conviniently from the manager sdk manager.
It's kinda broken. It works, but it still displays the updates that are already installed, and it even lets you reinstall them over and over again, which I did, until I realised that they were already installed and working.

You used to be able to put %s %d etc in strings.xml(here is a good forum topic about it), now you have to format it in a specific way.

The first time I re-checked out my projects from the svn server I ran into this. First thing I did was projects/clean, and obviously R crapped itself, and I got a few hundred errors because of it. It took me some time to figure out that I had a % symbol in my strings.xml.

To sum it up, this new version of the sdk doesn't feel like it's ready for production purposes. There a lot of hidden errors that I ran into. So if you are in the middle of a project, don't waste time by upgrading your sdk and (maybe) risk bumping into these problems and waste time.

Posted in: gingerbread, reviews, sdk