Switching my Android environment from Eclipse to Intellij IDEA

I've been using Eclipe for Android development pretty much since Android's release. I'm generally pretty happy using Eclipse; finding it always works well for small Android projects. 

More recently I've been using Maven with Android to better co-ordinate working with different libraries. Setting up Maven to work with Android in Eclipse was a bit of a pain, but not too difficult. 

Earlier this week I upgraded my Android SDK to r15; which promptly broke my project in Eclipse with a cryptic "Conversion to Dalvik format failed with error 1". Google reveals a number of people experiencing similar issues, but none of the suggested solutions seemed to work.

Another tack was to move from my old Galileo installation to a shiny new Indigo one and see if that helped. Got it all set up okay, and the old error went away; to be replaced with an out of memory error whenever I tried to launch.

Strangely enough everything still worked fine using Maven from the command line.

At this point I decided maybe Eclipse and it's various plugins were the weak link. Intellij IDEA seemed like it would be worth trying and the setup process was suprisingly straightforward. 

Beyond downloading and unzipping the community edition I had to setup the Sun JDK and JRE (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Java) instead of using the OpenJDK. I also had to setup an M2_HOME environment variable to point to my Maven install. Both of steps tasks were spelled out by the IDE. 

Within about 15 minutes of downloading I had the project error free, building and running on a device. 

So for developing in the new environment has been good. I'll post an update once I've done a bit more with it.