is there a netbeans gui plugin for android?

hi all
im trying to get my head around android programming with great difficulties
is it just me missing something or is android really difficult to write for.

many tutorials on android are about hello world (as if that can really help)
the other half are about setting up android on eclipse ide.
i have 2 books but yet still im just not getting it.

i have tried eclipse and though it may be a good product. to me its just headache .
so, whats the secret ?

please help. what can i do to digest this android more easily ?

im experienced in vb, assembly, c, php and java.

OMJ

Hi,

I reccomend you to use Eclipse plugins for Google products (e.g. Android and GWT) I tried the other way before. I chose to buy IntelliJ Idea but there are problems in that approach. One of them is that you will always wait your other IDE to catch the innovations introduced by large teams of Google etc. Now, i believe this is impractical and not correct. Also, note that you will find much more documentation for those Google tools and Eclipse!

By the way, i dont like Eclipse either and was an advocate for Netbeans until a few years ago. I was thinking that Eclipse and SWT are harmful for Java.
Now i am not writing much Java code at the moment but will start a huge project soon which will be based on GWT, Google App Engine etc. And i evaluated many related tools and thought about different aspects. So my 2c is that i reccomend you to use Google's way for Google's tools. :o:

> many tutorials on android are about hello world (as if that can really help) the other half are about setting up android on eclipse ide.

That is what i am talking about :) Go with Eclipse :)

I hope to find powerful plugins to make Eclipse more productive or learn more about internals of Eclipse when i start my next big project.
I guess Eclipse is hard to get used to because its design is not good as an IDE. It is designed as a platform and it is not intuitive to use as an IDE. But it is just a guess. I need to spend more time with Eclipse to understand it.

thanks for your time to reply
i fully concur with your reply and now taking a second bite out of Eclipse.
i have been with netbeans for quiet long time and so i can say that i am (maybe) too comfortable with it,
and in such respect makes me biased and judgmental towards other IDE's, which now to think of it.
could be part of my hindrance towards learning android.

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I guess Eclipse is hard to get used to because its design is not good as an IDE

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on ubuntu (my OS) its just nasty looking, bits of the program don't work at all... for example in the
xml so called graphic layout many bits of the properties panel simply does not work. which forces
the developer to keep switching between windows just to accomplish simple tasks.

please note im not here to bash or even try to to discredit eclipse but for me on ubuntu it appears
the that the work flow of eclipse does inhibit ones owns step in the path of learning.

Like you said IDE's must play catch up.

thanks again
oMJ

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many tutorials on android are about hello world (as if that can really help)
the other half are about setting up android on eclipse ide.

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The developer.android.com site has a lot of tutorials (step by step), sample code (source you study for yourself) and articles (description of the technology and how the bits fit together). It is in the nature of Tutorials that they make assumptions about the setup so that they can get on with the business of writing the code. In the case of android.developer that assumption is Eclipse. The wealth of material on that site is reason enough to install Eclipse (even if you use NetBeans as well - NB does support android development and its website is the place to go for details.)

Eclipse does require a reasonable amount of memory, and Eclipse+Android is even more hungry. Although I prefer Kubuntu I use Eclipse+Android on Windows machines to which I have access just because the hardware is better than that which I can afford...