Here at Odopod, the dev team meets weekly to talk about what's happening with technology around the web. Here's our top this week:

Aves - Paul Bakaus' JavaScript game engine.
• Cool: Everything.
• Not cool: It won't be released as open source (hey the man needs to make money right?)

scene.nr - Eddie Abrams' HTML5 audio project.
• Cool: HTML5 Winamp port including Winamp skin loading.
• Not cool: It still relies on Flash to grab the raw audio data.

UI Thread Presentation - Nicholas C. Zakas' super interesting talk from the jQuery conference.
• Cool: Understanding the inner workings of the UI Thread allows us to be smarter about page loading as well as maximizing user perception of speed.
• Not cool: The UI thread is a linear queue of execution.

Web Workers - Defines an API for running scripts in the background independently of any user interface scripts.
• Cool: Asynchronous JavaScript execution.
• Not cool: Only Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 currently support this.

This past weekend (Apr 24th and 26th) the jQuery Team had their first west coast conference, and it was a total success. The sold-out event, with an attendance of 500 people, was the biggest JavaScript conference to date.

Throughout the conference it was evident that talks and takeaways were more far reaching than the world of jQuery alone. This was not, by any means, a conference about pure evangelism. This approach, in my mind, made the conference even more of a success.

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