I wrote earlier regarding the new product from Google - the Google Inbox. GI is still work in progress, so some features present in the familiar GMail are absent or broken. I counted the "mute" functionality among them, because there was no obvious menu for it. Mute allows you to ignore conversations, which you don't particularly care about. This can be very useful when you are subscribed to various mailing lists.

All software engineers hate to write the same thing twice. However, at the moment it seems unavoidable when one wants to support both iOS and Android. Some strategies exist to avoid them, however none is perfect. For example, Phonegapp allows to develop your application in HTML/JavaScript, but the look and feel is not as native as one could wish, performance is bad for anything complex and your code is at the mercy of hackers. There are some commercial platforms which allow you to write in C# and then deploy on both iOS and Android.

Scala is a great language. One of its strengths is the effortless interoperability with Java. However, given the fact that the language is still evolving, some compromises are needed in order to facilitate cooperation between Scala in Java. In effect, sometimes you can't write 100% pure Scala solutions. Sometimes you have to add some Java code to your project, even if very simple one. There are two common examples of this: enumerations and annotations.

Again I find myself thinking about how to write as little code as possible when developing applications for various mobile platform. I do find it annoying in the extreme, that iOS, Android and Windows Phone all have mutually incompatible technologies. As if they were doing it on purpose. But maybe they just do? It helps the companies to lock in software developers as well as end users, doesn't it? Maybe they hope, that the developers won't bother to write code for all the platforms and will just stick with one.