iStat Menus — An Interview with Bjango
Bjango explains how iStat Menus grew from Dashboard widgets and what it takes to support changing Mac hardware for nearly two decades.
iStat Menus has followed the Mac through different processors, hardware designs, and generations of macOS. For My Mac Apps Story, I asked Marc from Bjango about its history and what it takes to keep a hardware-monitoring app working for nearly two decades.
Interview by Ighor July for Reverse Everything.
Interview
Ighor July
What inspired you to create iStat Menus, and how did the original Dashboard widgets develop into a full menu bar application?
Marc
Early on, we tried almost every imaginable form. The original SysStat Dashboard Widget became iStat Pro and iStat Nano, so we had big and small stats widgets as parallel products. We also created a Mac desktop app. Version 1 and 2 of iStat Menus were System Preferences panes, as well as menu bar items.
People preferred seeing their stats in the menu bar, and eventually Dashboard was removed from macOS. From that point of view, some of the decisions were made for us.
It was quite a shock to us that we were able to pursue this full time. We’re incredibly grateful, and I hope we can continue building iStat Menus for years to come.
We build things that interest us. It was created for ourselves, because we’re curious about the inner workings of our Macs. We’re happy other people also find it useful!
Ighor July
What have been the greatest technical challenges involved in maintaining iStat Menus across major changes in macOS and Mac hardware?
Marc
All the CPU transitions have required a lot of work, but they felt pretty similar, and we thankfully had enough time to figure it out. There’s also been quite a few changes to Apple’s menu bar frameworks that have triggered a lot of work at various points in macOS’ history. That feels very stable now though.
The camera housing (notch) on MacBook Pros caused us some issues, too. That’s because iStat Menus can be configured to take up a lot of space, which meant items may not be shown. We now detect that, and can warn the user it’s happening.
The main challenge is probably exactly what you’d expect — sensor stats and reading some of the more obscure stats across a wide range of hardware and OS versions. Every single new Mac or new OS may change how we need to do things. It keeps us on our toes.
Ighor July
Apple does not publicly document every sensor or internal hardware detail exposed by Macs. How much investigation is required when supporting a new Mac generation?
Marc
We’ve had to buy a lot of Macs over the years, and create our own tooling to test and figure things out. It’s become a little easier with Apple Silicon Macs, and because we’ve been doing this for over 20 years. But, it’s definitely one of the hardest parts of making iStat Menus.
Sometimes the solution is doing some pretty silly things, like sticking a skewer into a Mac Pro to stop a fan, and note which fan’s RPM goes to 0. We do this, so you don’t have to.
Ighor July
How has your approach to information density, graph design, typography, and customization developed across different versions?
Marc
Thank you! I’m not sure I have an exact process to share. When we’re working on a layout that doesn’t have an obvious solution, we often create a lot of mockups, covering almost every conceivable permutation. As much as we want our apps to be pretty, we try to favour data density and utility.
Ighor July
Why did you choose paid major upgrades rather than a subscription, and how do you decide when a release contains enough work to justify an upgrade?
Marc
I think we have a simple answer for this. Software subscriptions weren’t really a thing when we started, and they often don’t feel right for client-only apps. We’re a private company, and we’d rather make good long term decisions, rather than short term profits.
iStat Menus is available via our website, and the App Store, and Setapp. Setapp is a subscription, but it includes a lot of other apps as well. We’re all for providing lots of ways to get iStat Menus, and everyone can decide what’s best for themselves.
Major release planning happens organically. We keep notes on ideas we’ve had and feature requests, and eventually we get to a place where there’s no smaller to-do items left or bugs to fix, so we can move onto the larger things. For iStat Menus 7, it was a huge rewrite to modernise the app and give us a good base for the future. For iStat Menus 6, the main new feature was weather, which included setting up a lot of server infrastructure and do deals with the data providers, as well as the actual parts you see in iStat Menus itself.
Ighor July
What motivates you to continue developing and supporting iStat Menus after so many years?
Marc
That’s a great question. It’s a joy to work on a tool that we use ourselves, and it always brings a smile to my face when I see it in someone’s menu bar. It’s even been in TV shows before!
Ighor July
How has user feedback influenced its development? Were any important features, design changes, or product decisions based directly on user requests?
Marc
We absolutely love feedback. We love bug reports. We love people telling us iStat Menus is broken. That may sound strange, but it means we can improve iStat Menus for everyone, so people are doing us a favour in telling us about bugs.
The time and weather menus both were added in response to feedback.
Ighor July
What advice would you give to independent developers who hope to maintain and support their apps for ten years or longer?
Marc
Honestly, it comes down to people liking your app enough that they’ll use and recommend it. The challenge often isn’t technical. It’s about building up trust and respect.
I also feel like getting noticed is harder now than it used to be. There’s a good chance luck and timing played a big role in how things turned out for us.
This interview is part of the developer interview series connected to My Mac Apps Story, Part 3.