If anyone is interested, Yanis also guested on the EconTalk podcast in 2013, talking about Valve's corporate structure and plans for solving Greece's financial woes.
I don't think being mobile only is Path's problem. Plenty of social networks like Instagram and WhatsApp have flourished without a webpage. For most people, Path doesn't offer anything they don't get from Facebook, or Twitter, or Foursquare, or Instagram, so they stop posting or checking the app.
I think it's more to do with, like you said, Android phones covering such a huge spectrum of the market. Also that flagship models are often hugely discounted. Australian's love bargains.
It's probably worth mentioning that in Australia, off contract phone are far more popular than they are in the US. We have many competitive pre-paid options, so buying a phone outright often is cheaper, or better value than going on a plan. The Nexus 4 may have found the perfect market for skipping carriers.
It's also a little strange that Indiegogo only allows campaign contributors to post comments, something I learned when trying post a similar warning message to yours in the comments section.
"Myth: I've heard two factor authentication doesn't work in IMAP and POP"
I've found this to be true - to a certain extent. I had two factor authentication turned on and found it to be a nightmare in OSX Mail. Failures to retrieve mail, asking for my password constantly, etc. I was resetting the application passwords every two days. I tried to research a fix, but in the end it became less of a hassle just to turn it off and have my email work 100% of the time.
It's probably a bug in Mail.app in Lion, but I can't say my experiences with two factor auth have been positive.
Sadly, I think retina iMacs are further away than we'd like to hope. Eizo has a 36 inch 4K monitor for $35,000¹. There's a 31 inch 4K Viewsonic Monitor for an undisclosed price². Even that's only 150dpi. If Apple wants to make a pixel doubled 27 inch iMac for under 10K, I'd be surprised it if they could do it by 2013.
But then again, I thought the retina MacBook Pro was impossible. So perhaps I'm not the best judge of these things.
I don't think selling is broken provided purchasing is easy. Like how iTunes does it.
iTunes couldn't be more painless - search, click, password. It's true that the death of scarcity makes it hard to compete with hundreds of other sources offering it for free, but many people, myself included, find it worth the $15 AUD to get it legally without having to dick around with seeders, shitting ID3 tags, album artwork, and deleting original files after an iTunes import.
What Alphabasic is doing is fantastic. I love Bandcamp. I wish everyone used it. It has lossless files, and all the music is streamable.
Convenience is a big deal, it's why iTunes, and hotel room service, is popular and profitable.
I think what's going on here is how instagram and social media in general appeals to a shorter span, in the same way that many people will happily knock back four 45 minute Breaking Bad episodes, but the thought of sitting down and getting emotionally attached to a whole new group of characters, for a whole 100 minutes?
Well, compare that to unboxing an Apple product. Like an iPad. Instantly, you have to enter your Apple ID, regardless if you bought it yourself. The device is a brick until this happens. Then, once the set up is complete, the device has zero sample content on there. No music in the music app. No videos. No eBooks. Arguably, the only sample content they provide is web access.
The biggest failing I see this is argument is hierarchy. Sure, 16 point Georgia looks sexy as hell. If you have a text heavy website with little navigation, I'd definately recommend it. But in real world design situations, it's a mess. Even the Information Architects site looks flat. There's no easy way to guide the eyes because everything is ultra readable. There's no structure. It's an idealistic shortcut to readability.
For me, the most pleasurable reading experience I can think of is Instapaper on an iPad. What's the default size on that? I could be wrong, but I doubt it's anything larger than 14-16.
Besides, is it really a "costly mistake"? Is Facebook is failure because the text is small? Is Apple's website is design disaster? Both sites (and many more) feature a mix of large and small text with modest sized body. They're navigation is thought out and structured.
The 16 pixels argument encourages the opposite of that.
The biggest challenge I see for the iPhone 5 is a bigger screen size. If Apple do follow the competition/the demands of their users and make a bigger screen size, how are their apps going to scale? Either they lose the retina display branding and save app developers headaches, or they increase the resolution without doubling, making resizing of existing apps awkward and uneven.
Is there a way around this beyond adopting Android's flexible UI approach?
I do everything besides screenplays in plain text. Compatibility wins here. Between Google Docs, Word 2010, Word for Mac, Pages and Open Office, it seems even basic documents get mangled. RTF is only reasonably better.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/02/varoufakis_on_v.htm...