Google Drive and "Droit du seigneur"

Dropbox
“Your Stuff & Your Privacy: By using our Services you provide us with information, files, and folders that you submit to Dropbox (together, “your stuff”). You retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it. These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below.”

Microsoft’s SkyDrive
“5. Your Content: Except for material that we license to you, we don’t claim ownership of the content you provide on the service. Your content remains your content. We also don’t control, verify, or endorse the content that you and others make available on the service.”

Google Drive
“Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps).”

just sayin'....

Requirements-Driven Software Development Must Die

Awesome post.

Pretty obvious stuff if you worked in the field but very nicely laid out. Love the rage faces too. ;)

Education and realities of life

I really wish someone would have told me when I was in art school that your aesthetic skills and self determination are not the top priorities for your potential future employer. While both are important I'd like to see more realism in art/design education and more attention given to real life issues like delivering projects on time and on budget. This would really help kids out of school to apply themselves correctly and avoid potential conflicts.

Jakob Nielsen making waves again

Quite a few folks mentioned to me that Jakob Neilsen doesn't like responsive design -  examples provided here and here.

I've got a few things to say...

Jakob is a hell of a guy. I might not agree with everything he says but I've got to give him credit for being focused on usability.
I'll need to read his arguments again (his writing is not quite the Readers Digest type i am accustomed to) but currently it is the right approach I think. HTML5 and CCS3 despite lots of talk are not being widely adopted and building a responsive design with lots of code patches handling different devices is not an option in the long run.

Plus Josh Clark calls himself "mobile maven" which makes me question everything he says.  ;)

Seriously though, non of his critics provided any meaningful counter arguments.  If you really want to be taken seriously provide some numbers, sources and address the real issues without calling to the obvious "Mobile deserves better..." and your personal perceptions of how things should work.

Great menu trick

Just realized - TechCrunch has top menu that never goes away when users scrolls. Nice and simple.

Everyday wisdom

"Never argue with stupid people, they will bring you down to their level and then beat you with experience."

Mark Twain

Universal professional wisdom

You are as good as your last project.

Presentation tip

If you can't remember what to say without looking at a note card, it's probably not going to work in practice. You just need to tell people what you do and how you can provide value– it doesn't need to be complicated. If you can't remember everything you're trying to say, neither will they.