In 2011, Rogue Amoeba made not one but two phenomenal hires. As a result, for the second time this year, I’m delighted to be able to write about an employee milestone. Today we’re celebrating our developer Ed Wynne!

Ed’s Impact

Ed joined us full time back in October of 2011, which means we’re now recognizing him for a decade full-time here at Rogue Amoeba. However, he’s actually been making a difference here at Rogue Amoeba for much closer to two decades. Thanks to his efforts on multiple short-term contracts, Ed’s code served as the underpinning for our audio capture long before he was hired on.

Ed’s work has remained essential into the present, as it powers our ACE audio capture engine. Users generally don’t need to know much about ACE, but it provides audio capture to Airfoil, Audio Hijack, Loopback, Piezo and SoundSource. Thanks to ACE, those tools can get audio from other apps on your Mac, for you to manipulate as you desire.

In recent years, ACE has taken on significance outside of Rogue Amoeba as well. The audio capture it makes possible is now used by many other Mac products, through our licensing program. ACE is incredibly consequential code, with a vast number of users around the globe. It has to work seamlessly, and thanks to Ed, it does.

When it comes to more user-facing efforts, Ed’s work as the lead developer on our audio routing tool Loopback is the most notable. When we celebrated Ed’s five year anniversary back in 2016, Loopback was still fairly new and unknown. Since then, however, it’s grown to be one of our most popular and impactful products. The product really came into its own with version 2, released in late 2018. That upgrade brought an intuitive interface to cable-free audio routing, resulting in an easy to configure tool that provides amazing power.

Ed’s energy making Loopback so user-friendly was well-spent, because when so many people around the world began working remotely in early 2020, the app saw a major uptick in usage. Loopback’s audio routing power allowed people to do more with video calls, helped with podcasts, and much more. Ed’s tremendous work made that power available and accessible to countless users around the globe

If you’re a fervent Loopback user, or have ever made use of Airfoil, Audio Hijack, Piezo, or SoundSource, Ed’s code has helped you.

That 10 Year Anniversary Award

Like Grant and Chris before him, Ed has received our custom 10 year award: a silver Rogue Amoeba logo hand-poured by company co-founder Quentin Carnicelli. On looks alone, it handily beats your standard acrylic office trophy. Better yet, as a precious metal, it has a lot more inherent value than your standard paperweight.

That’s Ed’s award (on an iPad/amoeba stand), next to a celebratory adult beverage. In the background? Well that’s part of Ed’s robotics workshop. When he’s not making amazingly powerful audio software, he’s working with the robotics team at the local high school. How cool is that?

Closing

Since nearly the very beginning of Rogue Amoeba, Ed has been helping Mac users with their audio needs. On behalf of both everyone here at Rogue Amoeba, as well as the many, many Mac users who’ve been able to do so much with our products, we offer him our humble thanks. We’re thrilled to have worked with Ed lo these many years, and we look forward to much more to come.

Late last year, our crackerjack designer Neale Van Fleet had a clever idea for doing motion blur with CSS. He eventually wrote it up in an article for CSS-Tricks, and the technique has now found use across the web.

Recently, he came up with more fun CSS trickery. While working on our website, Neale began to experiment with an assortment of animations. He ultimately created a clever system for these animations, which his new article “A Handy Little System for Animated Entrances in CSS” explores. You can learn more about the techniques by reading Neale’s article, and spot them sprinkled throughout our site.