Musings about going from Eclipse to Android Studio 0.3.7

So, the first time around when Android Studio was announced I was pretty excited. Seeing that something tightly connected to Android in the shape of a Google pushed IDE, well that should bring a lot of nice things!
But alas, after a few hours of tinkering and trying to import projects exported from Eclipse by following the it’s-supposed-to-be-this-easy guides, I gave up. Too many issues with importing my projects and also, not having really used IntelliJ and even less Gradle, it was just too many issues at hand to keep track of that I chose to postpone.
So, here we are, version 0.3.7 later and I must say it seems a lot more straight forward (in most cases).

¤ One thing that I really have to stress is Android Studios way of not helping out how to import projects based on bare Android source code. The guides talk a whole lot about Maven and Gradle, but it took me actually testing out an import where I ignored all those keywords and reading the IntelliJ documentation on importing code, to be able to deduce that yes, it is possible to import bare Android code.
Really, this should have been much more clearly stated/supported because now, there is no clear way at all whether this kind of import is supported or not.

¤ Another thing. In Eclipse it was possible to mark projects as libraries and then chain the dependencies in a way that your project can reference a library that in turn references another library. With Android Studio it seems that your project has to refer to all the libraries it needs, in effect not being able to chain the dependencies.

¤ Oh, a third thing. It seems like the terminology “project” in Android Studio is an umbrella for keeping track of one or more “modules”. The Eclipse “projects” seem to map to “modules” in Android Studio and I guess Android Studios “projects” are most likely “workspaces” in Eclipse.

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