Working with Android for the first time, I've blocked out a layout using the relative layout and laid down some buttons and text widgets how I like them. However when I go back to rename the IDs the layout goes all crazy moving elements around and in general destroying the hours of work I spent laying them out.
Does anyone know how I can rename the widgets without Android destroying the positioning for widgets in the Relative Layout? Is this some "feature" of Android? I can't imagine why it would be hard for the UI builder to handle simple renaming of a widget ID without destroying the positioning information.. Do I have to use an external text editor and modify the XML files directly? Ughh I hope not.. I'm using Eclipse IDE.
You can use find and then replace all to change the names every place that they appear. Shouldn't take anywhere near an hour if you're dealing with a small layout.
In general the graphical UI creator that is currently included with the Android SDK is not so great for creating anything but very simple layouts. In my experiences (which were a long time ago, it may have gotten better since) it was terrible with RelativeLayouts.
If you have not modified your xml directly then it is time that you jump in and start learning to do it that way. You'll find that you have a much greater level of control over your layout, and once you get the basics figured out you'll probably be able to create quicker using raw xml then with the graphical tool anyway. I do wish that there were a nice GUI creator for android out there, the best one that I've ever come across is Droid Draw which I found to be better than the one included with the SDK, but still not as good as I was hoping.
To modify the xml directly you don't need any additional text editors, you do it inside eclipse. Open up your layout file and at the bottom click on the tab that says "Source" when you want to switch back to graphical (good to see the changes that you make to the xml graphically) just click back to the tab that says "Design"