I have recently switched from Eclipse to Intellij IDEA for Android development. I finally got fed up with the horrendous lag and general sluggishness of Eclipse. An application that is essentially a glorified text editor should not lag for 2-3 seconds on a key press. Upgrading to the latest `juno` release was the final straw, not only was the lag still there but the ui had gone from being clunky but usable to completely illogical and infuriating. So I decided to give the Intellij IDEA community edition a go. Wow, what a breath of fresh air!
Very little lag, very smart auto complete functions, logical and fast ui. Even build and run seems significantly faster. Only problem is that the free version doesn't support Grails development, so i have to switch back to Eclipse for the server component of my project, which is now a painful experience. The full version of IDEA is an eye watering 175 GBP for personal users. I think they have really misjudged the pricing here, sure make commercial licences expensive, but they are pricing out a large segment of the amateur/hobbyist market. I'd happily pay 50 to 60 GBP for such a quality product, however 175 for what is at the end of the day just a glorified text editor is ridiculous.
Still, if i sell a few thousand copies of my app then I'll seriously think about treating myself...
Hey. IntelliJ is $99 for the next few days, if you haven't bought it already.
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