It’s been something of a hiring whirlwind here at Rogue Amoeba, with the recent additions of Grant Farr and Jose Vazquez. Today, we’ve got yet another new face, in the form of Ed Wynne. Eagle-eyed readers will recognize Ed’s name from our About boxes, as Ed’s done a good deal of contract work for Rogue Amoeba over the years. He’s one of the brains behind the hijacker, which powers the audio capture used in Airfoil, Audio Hijack Pro, and Nicecast. Now, we’ve brought him on full-time to help us hack away.

You can learn all about Ed on our Staff page. He handles backend work (like the aforementioned hijacker), so you won’t see the results of his work directly. However, his code will continue to find its way into almost all of our products. We’re thrilled to have him on board.

Over at Businessweek, there’s a fascinating look inside Apple, focused on Senior Vice President of iOS Software Scott Forstall. There are lots of interesting bits, but perhaps the one which stuck out the most was this:

Before the introduction of the iPhone, Forstall supported Jobs’s view that Apple didn’t need to create an ecosystem of third-party developers. Back then they figured the device would stand out for combining a phone with an iPod plus a superfast browser. For the most popular activities—watching YouTube videos, for example—Forstall’s team would simply partner with market leaders such as Google to create apps built specifically for the iPhone.

With as far as Apple’s come in just 4 years, it would be easy to be misled into the idea that they planned every step along the way.

Two months ago, we introduced our then-newest hire Grant Farr. Today, we’re adding to the Rogue Amoeba family again! Jose Vazquez is the newest face on our Staff page, joining us as a Mac Software Engineer.

Over the summer, Jose did contract work on Fission. Now, he’s expanding that work as his first assignment with the company, and building on some of the work Grant did previously as well. We hope to have more information to share on Fission in the future, but for now, we’ll just welcome Jose aboard!

Update (September 26th, 2011): Airfoil for Windows 3.1 is now out! Get it now:

https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/windows/

Almost exactly two months ago, we released version 4.5 of Airfoil for Mac. This update brought a major new feature to Airfoil Speakers running on the Mac – the ability to receive audio from iOS and iTunes. With this, it’s now possible to send audio from an iOS device, as well as from iTunes, directly to a Mac running Airfoil Speakers.

This feature is very handy, and it’s been very well received. However, it hasn’t found its way to Windows yet. That’s about to change, as the next version (3.1) of Airfoil for Windows will include an update to Airfoil Speakers which enables it to receive audio from iOS and iTunes as well!

What’s with the future tense? Well, version 3.1 of Airfoil for Windows isn’t quite ready to ship to the public at large just yet. We want to be sure this functionality is rock-solid, so we need your help in testing. The new version has been tested internally for daily use, so now we’re ready to push it out to a wider pool of testers. Interested in sending audio from iOS or iTunes to your Windows machine? Download a public beta of version 3.1 of Airfoil for Windows right here.

How to Use It

To get started testing this functionality, download the public beta above and install it on all your machines. Once you’ve got it installed, just launch Airfoil Speakers, and it will appear in the list of AirPlay devices on iOS (with the name set in your Airfoil Speakers’ preferences – your machine name by default). When you play audio in an app on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, you can select Airfoil Speakers from the AirPlay list, and you’ll hear the audio right on your Windows machine.

Send audio from your iOS device right to your Windows machine

Airfoil Speakers remains a complimentary add-on for Airfoil, but if you’re using it on its own (without Airfoil), you’ll want to be sure to enter your Airfoil license into Airfoil Speakers to ensure it’s fully unlocked.

Feedback

If it works, great! Just keep using it until the official Airfoil 3.1 arrives (you’ll be alerted to the update when it ships). If you run into any problems, just use the all-new in-app support form (found in the Help menu) to let us know.

Airfoil 4.5.7 is an important update to our audio streaming tool, particularly for all Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) users, thanks to Instant On version 4.1. Instant On is an optional add-on for Airfoil which enables capture of all System Audio, as well as grabbing audio from already-running applications (instead of requiring that the application be quit and relaunched)

Unfortunately, this handy functionality was broken with the update to Lion. It took a lot of late nights (and one unfortunate false start) to get Instant On working again, but it’s finally here. We wish we could have had it sooner, but we’re delighted to have it available now.

We want to thank our users for their patience as we got this functionality working. We also want to take the time to apologize to those users and developers who had the misfortune of running into the issues caused by Instant On 4.0, as part of the quickly-retracted Airfoil 4.5.6. We did our very best to get the issues cleared up as soon as we could, but we obviously wish we’d never released the conflict into the wild at all.

Now then, all Airfoil 4 users should head over to the Airfoil page to get this free update now. If you’re an Audio Hijack Pro or Nicecast user, stay tuned – we’ll have updates for those apps very soon.