Uproot

Multi-touch interfaces are a topic of heated debate these days. Every minute someone is griping about their iPhone’s keyboard while somewhere else someone is praising Wired for giving the publishing industry new life.

There’s certainly no consensus but for deejays and producers, the multi-touch interface might be the next frontier in their craft. And Gerg Kaufman’s prototype for his thesis project at the Kansas City Art Institute might be the spaceship that takes us there.

Music is a big part of our background at Uproot. Two of us are former deejays while another is an electronic music producer. Needless to say, Greg’s project represents the type of creative technology we look forward to experimenting with.

Here’s photos of Kaufman’s early concepts for his Multi-Touch Light table including sketches and paper prototypes.

(Via Co.Design)

We’re extremely excited to announce the launch of Flashpoint: Training Day, a live-action game designed and built by Uproot and produced by Xenophile Media for CTV’s hit TV series, Flashpoint.

This project has been a 14-month journey that started with an idea to blur the lines between the audience and the show. Flashpoint: Training Day places the viewer right inside the world of Flashpoint where an original storyline and the show’s cast takes the viewer through a series of tasks and missions, eventually leading them to becoming a full-fledged member of the Strategic Response Unit.
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You might remember that big debate during the early days of Flash. Many argued that it was hurting the standards-based movement for how we consume and interact with web content. Flash had to find its place in the web for it be successful without impeding the need for consistent web interaction paradigms.

It took a long time to get to a place where both technologies could find their niche. Essentially, Flash for presenting rich, motion-based media and interactions for game or utility-based experiences and standards-based HTML/CSS for content-driven news and commerce experiences.

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Sometimes we’re asked to solve a functional problem that’s really an emotional problem.

Case in point, a client asks us to improve cart conversion citing the poor usability of their current site. Taking a closer look, the issue wasn’t a problem of findability (getting to a product and entering the checkout process is straightforward) or usability (the form entry is daunting but functional). The issue was emotional: Why would I enter this transaction with you?

We spend so much time trying create the simplest way to get from one point to another that we get caught up in trying to solve all our problems with better architecture. Often, you need better content.

We just received our shiny new iPad this week at Uproot and while we are sure there are greater things to come from it, Apple’s first shot is nothing short of amazing.

Of course, what brings the device to life are the applications it runs. One app we’re really excited about is Adobe Ideas. It’s a simple sketching tool that has garnered positive reviews since its release early this month and has first-page status on our iPad’s home screen.
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A recent Ipsos Reid poll showed the average Canadian is spending more time online than watching television. To get a clear picture on how this shift in mediums affects us as technologists, we need to question exactly what people are doing on the web versus watching TV.
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When working with web typography we have always pushed standards while trying to balance a great aesthetic, starting with sIFR and lately Cufón, however those solutions both had significant drawbacks for us as neither was perfect. That being said neither is @font-face… yet, and not because of the usual cohorts of delayed progress. However, with the announcement that type foundries are starting to offer web fonts we are encouraged that @font-face adoption might finally be realized.

For proper @font-face embedding both IE 4+ (that’s right) and now Firefox 3.6+ are ensuring that web fonts are being delivered securely through the web and not usable on desktop systems. Where the support is lacking for both Safari and to a lesser extent – Chrome as we await a announcement hopefully about their full support of Web Open Font Format. ** Chrome supports SVG as does the iPhone, but they are both painfully slow at the moment.
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It’s not every day a country gets a new national mobile service provider. However, today Wind Mobile, a company born out of the overwhelming consensus that the Canadian wireless market needed more competition, is open for business.
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During a trip to our local Apple store a couple of us in the office recently picked up the new Magic Mouse from Apple. Having heard mixed reviews I was eager to give it a go. A week after using it, the magic is gone.
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In a recent issue of Wired Magazine, Mathew Honan lead a call for submissions to redesign the world’s most popular classifieds site. Invited to the party were a slew of great designers including Khoi Vinh, Design Director of NYTimes.com and Scott Thomas aka SimpleScott, Director of Design for Obama for America.

Wired also opened up the submissions to the general public. Given our love for Craigslist, we wanted to take a stab at what we believe the next version should look like.
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