Uproot

The team here at Uproot are a week-deep into using Google Plus so we thought we’d share our initial impressions.
continue reading

We often talk about creative technology as the impetus to solving new challenges for industries like advertising, publishing and finance. However, as folks with friends and family who’ve recently required serious medical care over the last year, we wanted to pause talk about what we call ‘critical technology’ – the solutions that will help healthcare providers and patients get the best medical treatment possible through elegant Web-enabled, mobile systems.
continue reading

We usually don’t discuss the changes we make in our process as they are often very incremental and temporal. However, one recent change that we’d like to share is our decision to move away from producing page-level wireframes and toward creating prototypes as part of our Interaction Design practice. This is an approach widely discussed in our industry and certainly not novel to Uproot, but still in its infancy.
continue reading

Behind the beautifully designed and crafted Microsoft Arc Mouse lies a great story. In this video (requires Silverlight plug-in) Young Kim, Senior User Experience Designer at Microsoft, discusses the process of going from concept to completion through numerous iterations and refinements.
continue reading

This is gonna get a lot of press. Announced at DemoCamp 27 today (which featured guest speaker Fred Wilson, from AVC and Union Square Ventures), TaskAve is an app that allows you to set reminders for specific locations (e.g. “Remember to pick up milk” shows up as an alert on your phone up when you drive by Loblaws).

Judy Sims, who had the benefit of attending DemoCamp today has a great summary here.

Oh, and it was built (including the business model, based on offering sponsored promos based on your location) in 48 hours.

That’s creative technology.

Follow @TaskAve to keep updated.

Tweet

The first day after Labour Day brings back fond (er, dreaded?) memories of going back to school. School is definitely an environment that Uproot can identify with. There’s new faces, new locations, new teachers, new textbooks, new cities or even countries. The whole day is ripe with change.

On that note, we thought we’d celebrate the first day back with five of our favourite links on education.
continue reading

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:
continue reading

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.
continue reading

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.
continue reading