512 Pixels

Larry Page:

We have always wanted Google to be a company that is deserving of great love. But we recognize this is an ambitious goal because most large companies are not well-loved, or even seemingly set up with that in mind. We’re lucky to have a very direct relationship with our users, which creates a strong incentive for us to do the right thing. For every magic moment we create—like the ability to drop a photo into Google and search by image—we have a very happy user. And when our products don’t work or we make mistakes, it’s easy for users to go elsewhere because our competition is only a click away.

He’s right about that last bit, for sure.

Andrew S. Allen, the interaction designer behind Paper, in an interview with Joost van der Ree:

We made the tools smarter so you don’t have to have settings. Like our writing tool, you don’t have to adjust it, it makes your handwriting look good. It’s funny how many responses we’ve got from people who haven’t sketched in 15 years and it makes them feel like they can draw. To me that’s the promise of technology used right, when you enable people to really do things that they’re proud of.

Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram:

On Tuesday we launched Instagram for Android, and it’s had a fantastic response so far. The last few weeks (on the infrastructure side) have been all about capacity planning and preparation to get everything in place, but on launch day itself the challenge is to find problems quickly, get to the bottom of them, and roll out fixes ASAP. Here are some tools & techniques we used to tackle problems as they arose.

I love these behind-the-scenes posts.

I’m happy to announce that Bartending: Memoirs of an Apple Genius will go on sale Tuesday, April 10.

The book will be available for the Amazon Kindle and as a ePub file for just $8.99.

I’m so excited and nervous I could pee in my chair.

Amazing.

Clyde Prestowitz at CNN:

As a business, Apple has a right to fear that moving the assembly work from China to the United States will entail raising labor costs so high as to make the company less competitive and profitable. But for it to say that it has no obligation to help solve America’s problems is completely unacceptable.

I really don’t know what to think about this article.

Mark Hattersley at Macworld UK:

BlackBerry’s woes continue after a celebrity party, thrown by the company last night to celebrate BBM, ended in a vicious stabbing that forced police to lock celebrities inside the club and BlackBerry to cancel the event.

I’m officially freaked out.

Boom.

Depressing is right.

Why can’t they whip up some awesome new filters and charge some money for them?

MG Siegler:

The beauty of it being cross platform to me is situations like this. Because Instagram is becoming the ubiquitous camera app, it’s a great point of comparison. (It’s something we would have used Flickr for in the past, but no one seems to use Flickr anymore — at least not in the same way.) As a result, we can see how much better an iPhone camera is than a top Android camera. A lot.

This exposes something that is otherwise hard to expose: it’s either a lack of attention to detail amongst Android OEMs or a lack of caring. “Good enough” will never be the best.