The Age.com.au
SOMETIMES brilliant innovation hides behind a mild and modest face.
Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design genius, often regarded as the best of his kind (and also possibly the worst driver an Aston Martin has ever had) looks more like a commando than someone who turns computers into things of beauty.
So, no surprise that an anonymous building beside the railway station in the inner-eastern Melbourne suburb of Auburn is the headquarters of a young, innovative company with the curious name of Bjango. From here have come some of the nicest widgets and iPhone and iPod touch applications to reach the screen of a Macintosh.
It is a small team – just two young men – and it specialises in developing iPhone and iPod touch applications that it sells through the online iTunes App Store.
In another guise, named iSlayer, they also built the IceTV widget that works with Elgato’s tuners and a mobile version through which you can program your TV recordings remotely. This allows you to have a leisurely latte, catch a later train, avoid the commuter crush and still capture Clarkson’s latest excess on Top Gear.
The iSlayer team also produced the iStat system monitors for the Mac, which are rated among the best-ever Dashboard widgets.
The same stable produced Organized, which they call the Dashboard’s Swiss army knife. It includes a calendar, world clocks, notes, iCal events and “to dos”.
Also, for fun, they built the I Love Lamp, which just sits in the Dashboard blooping coloured blobs of virtual goo; nice to watch if you feel stressed.
The widgets are free (but donations would be friendly) and may be found at iSlayer.com.
They have now formed Bjango.com, already one of Melbourne’s more active iPhone app factories.
Why Bjango? “It’s just a word; we went through more than 100 before we settled on it,” says spokesman and graphic designer Marc Edwards.
Trivia tragics will know that Bjango was a ’90s song by the British electronic band Lucky Monkeys. Now, as the head of a simple URL, it will lead you to the first four iPhone apps this team has produced.
The flagship is Jobs, a time-tracker and job sheet for people who hate filling in forms. You call up Jobs on the iPhone, create a job name and hit play.
Time on the job is automatically recorded and it, along with other details, can be sent to a client as a CVS file or an email. It costs $5.99 from iTunes App Store.
“That’s the big one for us so far,” says Mr Edwards.
“We started off doing widgets – stuff we wanted but wasn’t there. It was the same with the apps.
We try to build things that are really simple to use but do a good job. If something complex has to be done we try to hide it away so the user doesn’t have to worry about it.”
Other Bjango apps include Cities, Darkness and Phases, all to do with time and place. Cities has a database of 2300locations in 180countries and will tell what time it was, is or will be anywhere on any date from the perspective of any time zone.
Darkness shows time, but also sunrise, sunset and moon phases anywhere in the world. Phases tracks the moon.
Soon to come is BeatBox, a useful tool for DJs, and after that an iPhone game. “We need to (finish building) it so we can play it and then steer it from there.”
After that, to get listed in the App Store formalities with the US Internal Revenue Service, and also Apple’s app referees, have to be navigated, a process that can take longer than building the app.
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