We have an exciting milestone to announce at Uproot. We’re moving to our new office at 110 Spadina Avenue next month. We’ll be closed on September 3rd, prior to the long weekend and be up and running by the following Tuesday.

We have a lot great things planned for our new home. We’ll hold off on the details for now but let’s just say that we look forward to making it an inspiring place for our team, clients and colleagues in our industry.

If you already follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you might have seen some of the photos of the new space as it evolves. For those interested, we’ll continue to post photos and information on Facebook to avoid cluttering up the blog with shameless self-promotion.

Our departure is bittersweet however as we’ll be leaving our friends at Idea Couture who have let us to grow in their space since Uproot’s inception. We’ve built Uproot from the ground-up without outside investment so being able to start here definitely gave us a head start. Our sincere thanks to Idris, Scott, Cheesan and their amazing team for making our time here memorable. We wish them the best as they continue to grow as well.

And to our clients, who of course are directly related to our ability to grow, we look forward to having you over to say thanks in person.

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.

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

We’re looking to add an Intermediate Interface Developer (2+ years experience) to for a 2-3 month contract with the opportunity to grow to a full-time role. Applicants must have a solid understanding of Flash, HTML/CSS/JS and show an ability to execute tight, standards-based code in an independent environment.

Skills

• Develop original and creative Flash animations and banner ads.
• AS3, Flash Builder, Adobe Photoshop CS4/5.
• Basic working knowledge of XML and XSLT.
• Ability to self-manage projects and work within deadlines.
• Experience working with online design requirements.
• Possibly develop standards-compliant webpages using: HTML, DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX and jQuery.
• Knowledge of QA processes, and version control (SVN).
• Knowledge of industry trends and best practices for usability, accessibility, as well as SEO.
• Team oriented, self-motivated.

Why work at Uproot?

We are creative technologists. As a group of interaction designers and interface developers we solve challenging problems through digital solutions for organizations like government agencies and marketers. We value the user experience and believe that technology enables great ideas and never limits it.

There are no middle-men at Uproot. We engage directly with our clients and they love us for it. We believe a strong understanding of design makes a great developer. And overall we love doing great work and making work great.

How to Apply

Send us a resume and portfolio of your work to careers@getuproot.com.

• Must be located in the GTA.
• Have references available upon request.

Suitable candidates will be contacted promptly. Please no phone calls.

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.

Now that the mobile application space has taken off, specifically with the adoption of the iPhone OS platform, the lines are being blurred again.

To clarify, we are not talking about Flash versus HTML5. We’re talking about re-visiting the need to use standards-based web as the chief medium for presenting content.

Take a look at what Fred Wilson discusses in a recent AVC post:

I’ve tried a few content apps on the iPad, including the much discussed Wired app. But I don’t like reading content via apps on the iPad and I gravitate to the Safari browser.

There are a bunch of reasons I feel this way and I thought I’d articulate them:

1) many of the apps treat pages as monolithic objects. you can’t cut and paste text, you can’t engage with the content. it is just like reading a magazine or a newspaper. if I wanted to read a magazine or newspaper in physical form, I’d do that.

The rest of the list is definitely worth a read. However, what struck me was that these same gripes could have applied to Flash over 10 years ago.

It will be interesting to see if content apps go through the same growing pains Flash did as we (re)define how content is consumed in the growing digital medium.

What are your thoughts?

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• - 16px DIN through Typekit the capital E is not the same line height as the rest of the characters, making that size unusable at this time.
• - For iPhone we ended up using Cufón anyway, again due to the delivery speed of SVG at this time.
• - Font weights are all packaged with your Typekit kit, this will create bloated CSS and JS (your typekit) depending on how many font variants you include. This would be true to an extent if we were just serving up .woff or .eot files as we will examine in Part two of this post.
• - Control of font variant for Typekit has to be done through numerical font-weight, while good, it’s not perfectly accurate for FF DIN.