AP Studio home

AP Studio is an IDE for Android

AP Studio includes multiple tools to allow building Android apps.

Code related tools

Project file browser

In the file browser you can quickly navigate through folders and select and open any project file.

The file navigator only contains the working project files, which means it won't get cluttered with files you don't need to edit in your project.

Some more highlights include

• Different folder icons for special folders to make navigation easier.
• package folders are merged into one for quicker navigation.
• right click on a folder to open it in the system File Explorer.
• nice icons for all interesting file types.

Code editor

In the code editor you can view and edit all supported text files. The editor supports code highlighting for several file types.

While AP Studio's long term vision is towards low-code or even no-code development the code editor does support code completion and other smart code features, which will be further developed in every new release.

Some more highlights include

• Code mini map
• Hover tooltips for strings, drawable resources and color resources.
• Ctrl+Click on strings, drawable, color, layout resources to open the source files.
• Ctrl+Click on project references to navigate to the source file.
• Peek definition and Goto Definition whenever supported.

File previews

AP Studio comes with preview widgets for many Android-specific files.

There are File preview widgets for:

• Shape drawables (as .XML files)
• Nine patch drawables (as .9.png files)
• Vector drawables (as .XML files)
• ...more coming

Image viewer

The image viewer allows you to view image files along with options to zoom in or out your image, change the preview background or navigate to a different density version of the file if such exists.

Future options will include basic image tweaking along with a separate Image Editor.

Text search in files

Quickly and easily search through all of your project's text files' content.

Results list all files where your search query is found along with the file name and line number of the match.

Resource related tools

Launcher icon

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The Launcher icon tool allows you to create launcher icons for your apps. You can define a background and foreground with various options and apply various effects. Most effects adhere to Material design guidelines but you can sure tweak as much as you want.

Once you're done creating your launcher icon you can save it and have AP Studio automatically set it as the launcher icon for the opened project.

9 Patch

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With the Nine patch tool you can create and edit nine patch images like a pro. The tool allows you to use your own image or create a nine patch image with a specific shape along with various shape options like color, border radius, clamping and so on.

Once you're done creating a nine patch image you can save it in multiple densities within the opened project or save it as a ZIP file for later use in any project.

Shape drawable

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With this tool you can create valid shape drawables or edit existing ones. Check a live preview and create your shape drawables using controls instead of writing code, enjoy the fine gradient previews and specification hints.

Once you're done creating a your shape drawable you can save it within your project or as a separate file for later use.

Layers

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This tool is an exciting view hierarchy inspector with extended capabilities which require a little bit more setup, but once set you can enjoy these features:

• View hierarchy tree
• Visual presentation of the views in 2D
• Visual presentation of the views in 3D
• Rotate and inspect the views in 3D with different perspective modes
• Change certain view properties live and see the changes immediately on your device.

Layers will include many other great features in coming releases, features such as displaying relations among the views, lint issues and others.

Various other development tools

Logcat

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Sure enough you can get the Android log live using this tool.

• Device selector
• Severity filter (also allowing for exclusive filtering)
• Tag filter
• Search
• Various display options

Gradle tasks

You can check all gradle tasks for your project in the Gradle task pane.

For now we only support running the installDebug task, but will enable running any gradle task in the next version of the app (probably even in the beta version).

Run project

You can build and run your project in debug mode on any running device. The build process can be followed in the build viewer where you have a hierarchical representation of the build along with raw build logs including a separate errors view.

Lint

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The linter uses Android's own Linting to give you insights about possible improvements in your projects, once done you can view, filter and display details about any of the issues found during linting.

Future versions of this tool will include smart actions to enable fixing issues with a single click.

Screen grabs

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Grab a device screen of any of the running devices, refresh as many times as you need to. Plus some more features:

• Zoom in and out
• Rotate (rotation is perserved when saving the file)
• Device information
• Save the screen grab as a file
• Copy the image to the Clipboard

Project Wizard

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Create Android projects quickly using our Project Wizard. Starting with 5 basic types of project we will add more templates and more options to allow you to do a lot of work at the project creation level.

Here's a list of the currently available project templates:

• Empty project (no activity)
• Basic activity
• Empty activity
• Bottom navigation activity
• Navigation drawer activity

Future

Wow, that's a lot of features for a humble start... check out some of the coming ones:

• Improved code editor
  Even though the long term goals of AP Studio include less and less writing code we sure are working on improving the code editor.
• State List Drawable Creator and Viewer
  This would make it easier to visualize, create and edit state list drawables.
• Layout viewer
  A very important one - initially only allowing viewing layout files, but eventually would also enable editing them visually.
• Gradle tasks handling
  Will allow running any gradle task and check the progress in the Build viewer.
• Git integration
  To easily commit/pull/push and more...

Really, the most interesting things are yet to come...