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)

On July 2nd the Guardian UK released their Wordpress plugin. Said plugin allows bloggers to grab a feed of articles from the Guardian and re-post them on their own blogs. Of course, since this is proprietary content there are a few stipulations, however none so obtrusive as to prevent any sane news blog editor from using this service regularly. The terms of service are pretty simple, and they read as follows:

1. Changes: You mustn’t remove or alter the text, links or images you get from us.

2. Key: If you don’t have a key, get one here. It’s required. If you do have one, please don’t share it or use it anywhere else.

3. Ads: Articles come with ads and performance tracking embedded in them. As above, you mustn’t change or remove them. You can, of course, use your own ads elsewhere on your blog, too.

4. Deletions: Sometimes but very rarely we have to remove articles. When that happens, this plug-in will replace the withdrawn Guardian content within your blog post with a message saying that the content is not available anymore.

We think these are pretty fair and easy rules to follow and rule number 3 may be the answer to monetizing the online news world in a sustainable and progressive way.

Think of the opportunity that presents itself from this, the news paper / news agency can have their content syndicated to the millions of blogs that they claim have been taking readership away and still make money from it, and the readers get better news because there is that much more incentive to write news that readers feel is important and want to read. It’s really a win win!

For more information take a look at the full “Open Platform” service offering over at the Guardian’s website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform

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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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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‘Who are you?’ and ‘What are you doing?’ were the main questions the web tried to answer in the last decade. As we move into a new era in technology, it’s clear now that ‘Where are you?’ is now the focus. This simple query is growing from a need to know where friends are into a platform to help people find products, services and information related to their local needs.
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At Uproot we are very interested in expanding our understanding of interactivity to more than just the web. Enter the Arduino! A tiny Italian made computer that is 1000 times less powerful than the iMac i am typing this on. To program it you just have to learn the Arduino proprietary language (not too difficult for anyone who knows javascript) and you can make all kinds of interesting devices that can be interacted with in the real world. You can make your device interactive by using varying kinds of sensors (i.e. light, sound, movement etc).

We decided to build a floating balloon installation with LED lights inside the balloons. Our first step was to make a materials list. First we wanted this thing to float so we needed some helium, second we needed to put the helium into something: balloons, third we needed to attach the balloons to the Arduino: wires, fourth we needed to make it visual: lights (LEDS), finally we needed to power it: 9 volt battery.


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