Is Apple still a misfit, a rebel, a round peg in a square hole?

After watching the Apple WWDC keynote earlier this month, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the beta's for Mac OS X Yosemite and iOS 8. I was able to get hooked up 24 hours later, and have since been curiously discovering the new design and features.

I've always loved the attention to tiny (yet unexpected) details Apple puts into its products and design. Case in point, the icon for TextEdit.

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Redesigning the Mint.com "Budgets" page

I use Mint on a weekly basis (desktop + iPhone), and I think it's great! I do however have trouble navigating the "Budgets" page.  It's not as intuitive as I'd like to be.

I took the liberty of mocking up a new design for this page, borrowing design from the "Overview" page and the Mint iPhone app. I hope Mint's design team takes a look and gives it consideration.

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How accurate is the iPhone 5s CPU performance chart?

Apple's keynotes have become famous for the amount of detail and attention put into the slide decks, the interactive demos, and the perfectly scripted speeches. I've watched every keynote religiously since the original iPhone announcement in 2007. 

The team at Apple is great at telling stories. The press and fans are engaged every second of the keynote because the story always captivates them. There's a fine balance between the introduction ("we believe in innovation"), rising action ("our competitors are confused"), the climax ("new launches + one more thing"), and the ending ("live band"). To understand the way the plot works, check out How to Present like Steve Jobs from the folks at KissMetrics. Great read!

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Creating a great content tagging experience

Tags (or labels) have been around for a long time, and they serve a clear purpose: organizing content. The construct comes from the real world use of labels, glued or clipped onto manilla folders. In a digital world, we use tags to organize our blogs, our notes, our emails, our journals our notes, our meetings, our portfolios and so on.

We've been accustomed to tagging our content, but I feel many user interfaces have "tagged on" (pun intended) the experience of tagging as an after thought. I feel there hasn't been any standardization, so depending on what website/app I'm using, tags always seem to work differently. 

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