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Andy Affleck

Andy Affleck

Andy Affleck (formerly Williams) has been using Macs since 1984. By day he is a Technical Program Manager and Sr. Project Manager currently working at Pfizer, and in his spare time he is a web designer and developer, executive director (and actor) of Swamp Meadow Community Theater, an amateur photographer, and has a LEGO problem. He is also the author of Take Control of Podcasting.

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Farrago: A Fun and Useful Soundboard for the Mac

Farrago is Rogue Amoeba’s new soundboard tool for podcasts and live performances. It’s a neat little tool for enhancing recordings or events of any sort with predefined sound clips.

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How to Stop iCloud Calendar Spam

A “helpful” feature of iCloud lets spammers insert ads in your calendar as event invitations. Andy Affleck explains how spammers are exploiting iCloud and what you can do to stop it.

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Podcasts App Breaks Podcasts out of Music App

Apple has released a new iOS app called Podcasts that focuses on — wait for it — podcasts, removing the need to listen to podcasts in the Music app. However, along with some impressive skeuomorphic graphics, the Podcasts app has a few interface and performance issues.

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Reunion 10 Offers Better Genealogical Overviews, Web Search

The venerable genealogy tool Reunion has received a significant overhaul with version 10, adding new interface views, additional reports and charts, and the capability to search for information about a given person on key genealogical Web sites.

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MacGourmet 3.0.1

Features a completely revamped interface, and significant improvements to the recipe editor, chef view, and recipe import assistant. (MacGourmet 3.0: $29 new, $10 upgrade, free updates for purchases after 1 July 2010, 12.7 MB. MacGourmet Deluxe 3.0: $49.95 new, $24.94 upgrade, $34.95 sidegrade, 26.5 MB)

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When Should We Introduce Social Media to Kids?

Many of parents of pre-teen children are being pressured by their kids for Facebook accounts and other social media. When is the right time to allow such online access, and in what way? Andy Affleck, parent of a 10-year-old, explores the issue.

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WireTap Anywhere Records from Multiple Sources

Wish you could simultaneously record the audio from an iChat voice chat, a Skype call, and iTunes? WireTap Anywhere lets you mix and match your hardware and software audio inputs.

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WireTap Studio: Lossless Editing and Real-Time Audio Preview

Ambrosia Software's new WireTap Studio ups the ante in the field of easy-to-use audio recording and editing tools. Find out what Andy Affleck, author of "Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac," thinks of the new release and how it stacks up against existing tools.

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Cook from Your Mac: 10 Recipe Tools Compared

The first thing computers were supposed to do in the home was help keep recipe databases. Although putting a Mac in a messy kitchen may not be the smartest thing for the health of the Mac, numerous recipe tracking programs have appeared over the years. In this overview, Andy Affleck compares 10 contenders. Read on to find out which tool will work for your gourmet or nutritional needs!

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Sound Studio 3.5 Adds Numerous Features

Freeverse has released Sound Studio 3.5, which adds many new features of interest to all users of this excellent audio editor and recorder. Sound Studio has long been my favorite tool for editing audio files, whether I'm producing a podcast, trimming a file in my iTunes library, or recording my son's funny snore one night (and later removing the laptop fan noise from the recording - it's important to have high quality embarrassment material for when he's a teenager)

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Apple Releases iTunes 4.9 with Podcasting Support

Apple last week released iTunes 4.9, adding extensive support for finding, subscribing to, and managing podcasts, which are audio files that are made available for anyone on the Internet download and listen to (see "Podcasting: The People's Radio" in TidBITS-766)

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Podcasting: The People’s Radio

Few buzzwords surrounding Internet technologies have moved into the mainstream more quickly than "podcasting," but because of this speed and an only tangentially related name, few consumer-level technologies have engendered more confusion

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LaserWriter 16/600 PS

Apple's new LaserWriter 16/600 PS sports a new naming scheme that ties the name of the printer to the printer's features. The name indicates three things: pages-per-minute (ppm), dots-per-inch (dpi), and page description language