Yes, it's late but, in my defence, we've been having remarkably good weather these last few weeks. This month there are six films up for review. Onwards.

First up is the suprising Silent Hill; surprising because despite some fairly impressive special effects with which to play (the melting between worlds), the film is incredibly bad. A bad mix of the first two Silent Hill games, the plot doesn't really know where it is going. The acting is as b-movie as you would expect, with Sean Bean putting in a terrible performance (the man cannot do American accents, don't make him try). Couple this with a plot unravelled in a haphazard mixture of dream sequences, narration, flash backs and every other bad ploy taken by poor film makers in recent years and you have a film which does not do the plodding source material justice.

Slither is an excellent comedy horror film that finds the right balance between laughs, characters and a hokey plot. Sure, it's a fairly textbook premise (aliens body snatchers 101), but the spirit of the film is good natured and never tries to be more than that. It won't be winning any awards, but worth the effort.

On the action front, Mission:Impossible 3 is exactly that: a dumb action film. Arguably better in many ways that it's fairly shoddy predecessors, this take is handled with more style but the same logical gaps that make the series exasperatingly painful. Hoffman did the best with what he had to work with and Cruise... well, Cruise runs about a bit. Expect to see the same old rope tricks and face changes.

An American Haunting is a schizoid horror film. Set primarily in the 1700s, it chops and changes between wanting to be a ghost story, to something far more pedestrian but chilling, to a ghost revenge story, all bookmarked by a pointless narration in modern times. The desperation of the family comes across as laboured, and the decline of the main characters as expected. Terrible.

Scott Ryan has put together a delightfully offbeat mockumentary in the form of The Magician, the story of a hired killer who is eventually offered a large cash sum not to kill a victim. The subject matter is dark and the humour is too, coming mostly from the bizarre conversations between the central character, has cameraman and would-be victim. Funny, different, good: go see.

The gross-out comedy stuffing is pretty stale these days, but Waiting... is a decent example of serving it well. The guts of this comedy revolve around a simple recurring joke involving male nudity (if you haven't been introduced to 'The Game' then it's not my place to get you in), but it hits just the right spot. The character development etc are as weak as one might expect but like all films of this genre, it's about the quirks of the characters as they stand. Not a masterpiece by any standards, but still a fairly stand-up, dumb comedy.

Finally, Down In The Valley stars Ed Norton as a cowboy who finds himself a cowgirl in the sprawl of Los Angeles. Things, inevitably, go wrong and Ed goes a bit off the wall. While Norton puts in a decent performance, the film itself is fairly meandering and badly cut. Dull, turgid, bad.

The winner for May is easily The Magician.

• 

  As you’ve probably heard by now, Clearleft is organising another d.Construct conference this year, set for Friday 8th September. Like last year we’re keeping it nice and cheap – the idea is that even freelancers can afford the £75 entrance fee. But because it’s cheap, you’ll need to be quick – last year sold out in half an hour!. Tickets go on sale on Tuesday 18th at 10am (British Summer Time) and to help you get in quick, we’ve put together a funky little countdown on the registration page. We’re hoping plenty of folk can stay the weekend in Brighton (which is why we put the conference on a Friday) but if you do, beware that another conference is on shortly afterwards, so hotel rooms may get booked up pretty quickly.

  d.Construct is essentially about building the new wave of web applications – Web 2.0, Ajax, tagging, user-generated content (authentic media) and all that. You can now see a run-down of the schedule, and on it you may spot the main focus for this year is APIs. For me this is the biggest thing about Web 2.0: websites sharing information and content by design. We have Jeff Barr from Amazon; Simon Willison and Paul Hammond from Yahoo!; and our own Jeremy Keith talking about different aspects of APIs – innovation, business implications, inspiration, technical challenges and group mashups are all covered.

  Also on stage, and back by popular demand, we have Aral Balkan who will once again be opening our eyes to the – frankly astonishing – world of Open Source Flash, Flash Platform and Flex 2. We can’t talk about Flash without mentioning accessibility, and that’s exactly what Derek Featherstone will be doing, by way of giving us strategies for making Web 2.0 design patterns more accessible. And we can’t talk about Web 2.0 with mentioning tags. Thomas Vander Wal will be explaining how we can make tagging systems live up to the hype (incidentally, if you’re blogging about d.Construct 2006 please you tag your blog posts with dconstruct06 for easy Technorati collation). Last but not least, we’re dead chuffed to have Google’s Jeff Veen wrap up the conference with thoughts and solutions on designing the complete user experience – anyone who saw his talk at @media will understand our excitement about having Jeff with us in Brighton.

  As with last year, we’ll be podcasting d.Construct. But for this year we’ve started podcasting early. Jeremy has done a fanastic job of splicing together a review of last year’s conference. He’s also been chatting to attendees and speakers for this year’s conference, something which Garageband makes fantastically easy to podcast as it automatically detects an iChat and puts each particant on an individual channel so that filters and levels and be applied to each. Pretty cool stuff, I thought. Anyhow, you can subscribe to the feed directly or go the podcast page for more info, iTunes and Odeo links etc.

  Update. Feel free to advertise your presence at d.Construct on Upcoming.

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• 

  That little mouthful is the full title of the latest book with my name on it. Published by Friends of Ed, it’s now gone to the printers and will be available sometime in July. I was extremely proud to be asked to contribute, as there are some real shining lights in the world of accessibility involved; how’s this for an awesome line up: Andrew Kirkpatrick, Christian Heilmann, Jim Thatcher, Cynthia Waddell, Michael R. Burks, Shawn Lawton Henry, Bruce Lawson, Mark Urban, Patrick H. Lauke and Gez Lemon (tech editing).

  As the subtitle implies, the book focusses on a web standards approach to accessibility, with chapters on HTML, Javascript and my chapter on CSS. But this is a practical book, and the web does not work on standards alone, so there are also excellent chapters on making Flash and PDF accessible, as well as details about assistive technologies. The issue of web accessibility in law and regulations is also of importance to many people. In my opinion this book covers these issues to the deepest, most pragmatic level I’ve yet seen. There was even time to squeeze in an appendix on PAS 78.

  Writing a chapter on ‘CSS for Accessible Web Pages’ was an interesting exercise in itself as it meant taking CSS in isolation. Some aspects are obvious – user style sheets for example. Others are less obvious such as discussion of highlighting areas of the page which have focus. I included a fairly deep discussion of image replacement techniques as these can be really problematic from an accessibility perspective. I also highlighted as many best practices as I could (for example including text colors with background colors) including a special section on zoom layouts.

  As you can tell I’m somewhat pleased with Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance and I’m really looking forward to seeing the final book. I know it will make a really useful addition to our shelves at Clearleft.

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• So I was perusing the Guardian’s World Cup fixtures guide and noticed a little feature I’d never seen before: line breaks in tooltips.

  

  The solution for achieving this is devilishly simple – just use the carriage return entity 
 in your title attribute, for example:

  title='Kick-off : 20:00
 Stadium :  Rhein Energy Stadion, Cologne'

  You are limited by how much information you can actually show in a standard tooltip as IE/Win will only display the first 64 characters of a title attribute, however using an entity like this is still a nice, lightweight technique for basic formatting. More advanced formatting can be achieved through JavaScript wizardry such as Nice titles.

  The little triangle image used by the Guardian to indicate a note is also a nice touch, and borrows from a visual approach which may be familiar to users of Excel. Whether important information like venue and kick off time should be ‘hidden’ in a title attribute is another question.

• On a World Cup related note, Dan Hill has been waxing lyrical about the fantastic goal scored by Argentina against Serbia & Montenegro. Dan posted a scan of Guardian’s visual representation of the goal which I’ve repeated here:

  

  It is clearly quite a challenge to create a static image of such a complex event which occured over time. For that reason, I’ve taken the liberty of embedding the video for your delectation and comparison purposes (invalid code follows).

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I've had a couple of questions by email that I should answer (note I've paraphrased some of these):

What fonts should I use for my HTML Media Center application and can I use Flash?  The SDK is where to go for design guidelines for HTML applications (the short answer is to use a sans serif font).  Yes, Flash can be used in HTML Media Center applications - Napster and MSN Music both use Flash.

How can I add an application to the Start Menu?  You can't.  Well OK, you can, but we recommend that only OEMs use this functionality as there is a limit to how many applications can appear on the start menu and adding a new app will stomp on existing applications.  If you intend to distribute your application you shouldn't do this, but if you really want to know, the details are in the SDK here.

I've seen the Media Center software for sale online is it OK to buy it?  I'm no lawyer so I'm not going to comment on this.  Media Center is an OEM product and only available with new PCs is the official answer though.

Cesar at Zune Insider has posted a videoof the new Zune UI.  I think this is the same B-roll footage provided to thepress, but it gives a good overview of some of the UI features.

Lotsof Zune chatter for the coming day.  First, an articleby the Seattle Weekly profiling J. and team.   Scoble ofcourse weighs in. As does NathanWeinberg at Inside Microsoft. Now the www.comingzune.com sitehas a decidedly unusual, MTVish, yet intriguing video up (Flash intro, WMV downloadonce you watch the intro).  At first I worried about PETA raising up in armsbut watch it all the way through- it's worth it.  The song is a new title, 'TheSecond Coming of the Monkey God' by AshtarCommand - definitely one for my 'Gym Rock' mix.  I'm sure we'll be hearingmore Zune. (sorry, I couldn't resist) :).

• Use of EE segments and conditionals to reduce the number of templates required. The bulk of the site content runs through 3 templates.
• EE integration with the Monoslideshow tool for the Flash animation on the home page. This integration allows the church to update that Flash piece by simply posting a new EE entry consisting of a new image and the descriptive text. Christ Memorial can use the EE publish and expire dates to ensure that event-related promotions appear and disappear from the site at the right time.
• Rotating header images are implemented using another EE weblog, each image being one entry and the presentation set to random.