Two days ago  ADT 20 was liberated, and I’ve been using it at work. So I thought I’d share my first impressions with you.

What I love

This one is easy. I love what you guys did with the layout editor. I hated down to the bone the fact I had to switch all the time between layout editor / outline / properties windows. They redesigned everything here, and now I find it a lot more usable.

The new logcat handling is pretty good, although I didn’t have any particular complaints about the old version.

One thing that made my day is the fact that you can press  cmd  and hover over any resource, and you finally have relevant options! Who wanted to see its definition in R.java? No- f*kin -one! You can see the string value or open the layout with the layout editor, for example. Awesome. At last.

Still hadn’t had the time to try the new performance viewer so I will refrain commenting about that one.

What I hate

Seriously, what were you thinking? At least, in the first version available (the one I’m using right now), I have to clean up my projects every time I change something at UI level. It’s annoying as hell.

Of course, I hate Eclipse, but that’s not new. Someday I’ll be able to code in something like Visual Studio or even better for all the platforms I really dig. In fact, that’s what really makes me want to code some Windows Phone stuff: its wonderful  IDE.

Final thoughts

Well, first of all, the should fix the issues asap. I don’t like Eclipse a lot so it’s like adding fuel to the fire.

However, each version they are improving the experience a lot. I still miss some more refactoring options, of course, but they’re going in the right direction.