From my experience with Android, I just want to make a plug for the
IntelliJ IDE for android development. I can't really compare it to
Eclipse, the giant multi-language more well known IDE for Android, except to say that the last time I used eclipse I found it quite overwhelming. IntelliJ is still a monster of an IDE feature-wise, but it seems more manageable to me.
IntelliJ is a commercial product, but there is a free community edition, and if you are actively involved in an open-source project you can apply for a free open-source full license. IntelliJ was also repackaged as
Android Studio which looks to be a great free solution for new Android developers.
When I'm coding in a plain vanilla language (like C++), an IDE is not all that important -- but for something like android, the autocomplete features of the IDE are indispensable, and IntelliJ does a very nice job with such things, and just in general makes it much less stressful learning about android project structure organization and building. There is a *lot* of confusing overhead involved in building android projects that has nothing to do with programming and everything to do with build management and file structures, etc., so I welcome any help I can get.
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