JetBrains has announced the availability of IntelliJ IDEA 11 in what is a regular annual update of its IDE for JVM-based and "polyglot" development. This release reveals a custom, streamlined user interface along with IDE performance optimizations and numerous adjustments throughout the whole environment, to refine the effectiveness of developers' typical day-to-day operations.

Note: Polyglot development refers to the fact that "most" developers will typically use a mixture of Java, C++, Python, Visual Basic, JavaScript, etc. and they are therefore, by definition, polyglots — capable of speaking (or in this case writing/coding) several languages. The coining of the term has been attributed to ThoughtWorks architect Neal Ford.

"For a product as huge as IntelliJ IDEA, every new feature is like a tiny drop in the ocean. But when users evaluate a tool, it's not the feature set that wins — it's the impression the tool leaves at the end of the day," said Max Shafirov, IntelliJ IDEA project lead. "We add great new features in every update, but rethinking the existing features is the better part of the work we do for a major release. IntelliJ IDEA 11, with its brand-new slick UI for all supported platforms, is the best example of a reevaluated user experience, with higher productivity and even more attention to details."

In addition to the new UI for all platforms, JetBrains insists that IntelliJ IDEA is now a better citizen on all of its supported platforms, with many platform-specific features added such as Mac OS X Lion full-screen support or drag-and-drop and symbolic links support on Linux.

To contribute to faster development of technologies, IntelliJ IDEA 11 brings many improvements for its many integrated tools and frameworks including Spring, Groovy/Grails, AspectJ and others. The updated IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition also gets important improvements for Android development, including live preview of Android UI layouts and compatibility with the latest Android 4.0 SDK.