For BlackBerry developers, having the latest and greatest tools to make apps is important and to help keep things moving along, BlackBerry has now released their BlackBerry Tools for Android Development 2.0.2 Beta. The last update to the tools came back in October, so a new update is great to see. The list of feature additions is pretty long for this one but we’ve got them all for you past the break.

  • New GUI Shortcuts - With today’s 2.0.2 beta, we’ve added executable shortcuts for the GUI tools, which removes the need to start them from within a command-prompt or terminal instance. Just double-click the shortcut for the tool you require and you’re good to go! The 2.0.2 command-line tools for Android apps can be downloaded here and extracted anywhere on your Mac or Windows development machine. Official support for Linux is coming soon.
  • Support for Android Studio - This beta release also includes support for Google’s Android Studio IDE. Even though this IDE is in an early beta phase, we decided to release an alpha plug-in to allow Android developers to easily target BlackBerry 10 devices. The Android Studio alpha plug-in is currently being offered as an offline archive available for download here.
  • Updated Eclipse Plugin - We will continue to support the ADT plug-in for Eclipse, which has been updated to reflect the 2.0.2 update to our Android tool chain. You can download or upgrade to the newest release by checking out our Tools page.
  • Expanded Mac and Java Support - Our latest release also includes official support for Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9 as well as Java Development Kit 7.

If you're a developer and looking to give the new beta tools a go, you can head on over to the BlackBerry Developer Android page or check out BlackBerry Dev Blog post on it all.

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