![]() ![]() ME: I think we added date and time and all the calendar stuff, that was, I think. What are your top two favorite hidden features in iStat Menus? I know a lot of our readers use iStat Menus and, I’m a geek, but even I stumble into things in iStat Menus, regularly, that I had no idea were there. TMO: Well that’s good, because that’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s one of those apps where every new Mac model that gets released has new sensors, and there’s new stuff to check, so we have to buy a lot of Macs for testing. There are things that seem like a natural fit, and we’ve hunted those down. And the great thing about having something as mature as iStat Menus, I mean we’ve been working on iStat for eight years now, in some form or another. How has that process happened? Is that based on your needs? Or the user’s needs? But with iStat Menus, you’ve iterated this over time. You'd get yourself bounced right out for that. ME: Well, it doesn’t sound like something that would be on the iOS App Store. TMO: Especially with backgrounding coming up, right? You’ve got some app that’s spinning around in the background. Those who want to know what’s happening, if things start getting a bit choked up, and they want to hunt down what they either need to improve or which tasks they need to kill. You know, people who are rendering things or running things in the background. I guess the beauty of iOS is that it just kind of works, unless you’re a developer trying to figure things out.Ī lot of our iStat Menus users are music or video professionals. The front most app, well, generally speaking, historically has been mostly all that’s running. ME: There’s less interesting stuff there. TMO: And have you looked into creating an iStat for iOS that actually pulls data from iOS and delivers that? All those issues we would have just aren’t there. ME: Yeah, and obviously all the stuff that makes iStat Menus difficult to be in the Mac App Store doesn’t exist because iStat for iOS is just viewing data from your Mac or from Linux, or Windows, or whatever. But of course you then went on to create iStat for iOS, which has to exist in the App Store. TMO: iStat Menus is an interesting thing because it can’t exist in the App Store. ME: Well, when did we change that? In version 3 we moved to preferences, that was the first paid. TMO: It wasn’t a full Mac app until version 4. I think that might have been the first one we released because it was a preference pane, so it wasn’t necessarily even a real, full Mac app. Had you developed a Mac app prior to iStat Menus or was that really, truly the first thing? I didn’t realize that was the evolution of that. And then we became Mac developers and iStat Pro, as a Dashboard widget, seemed more appropriate as a Menu bar application. ME: So that’s where we started, and iStat Pro morphed into a whole lot of other stuff and we ended up doing a whole lot of Cocoa stuff for iStat Pro. Which is probably going to stay that way because dashboard widgets aren’t really a thing anymore. iStat Pro the widget was the most popular third-party dashboard widget yet. We stopped tracking the numbers towards the end, but I think of all our widgets and Mac apps that we gave away for free, before we kind of started becoming, you know, a real company, amounted to about 30 million downloads. One of the ones that kind of did okay was iStat Pro. Some of them were pretty terrible, some of them were great. We were just doing it as a hobby, and some of them stuck, some of them didn’t. ![]() ![]() And we made a lot of Dashboard widgets, maybe fifty or sixty. Marc Edwards: We sort of started back around Mac OS 10.4, when Dashboard widgets came out. Was that the first product that Bjango made? Certainly in our world that’s the product that comes to mind when Bjango is mentioned. In our seventh interview, Dave Hamilton chats with Marc Edwards of Bjango, famous for iStat Menus on the Mac.ĭave Hamilton: I’m here at WWDC with Marc Edwards from Bjango. The result is usually a number of serious insights into the state of mind of the developer community. Each year at WWDC, TMO interviews a few Apple developers who want to tell their story. ![]()
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