What can we call you? Marc Edwards.

What can we call your company? Bjango.

Where are you situated? Melbourne, Australia. Yes, that giant, mostly empty island at the end of the earth. It’s a great place to live, provided you avoid the killer snakes, killer spiders, killer sharks and various other nasties.

On the web? Bjango.com

And on Twitter? @bjango and @marcedwards

What apps do you make? iStat Menus for Mac, iStat for iPhone, Consume for iPhone, Darkness for iPhone, Cities for iPhone, and a few others.

What apps, other than your own, do you currently use the most often? 1Password, Brushes, The Early Edition, Reeder (yes, two RSS readers) and Our Choice. There’s some obvious and potentially boring choices in there, but those are the current apps I’ve been using daily or enjoying.

How long have you been a developer? We started building Mac Dashboard Widgets in 2005, which quickly turned into Mac app development. Prior to that I’d designed some fairly basic websites. And prior to that, I spent most of my time designing for print and for TV advertising. Creating software is incredibly rewarding and challenging, so I think I’ll be doing it for quite some time.

How long have you been an iOS developer? We’ve been building iOS apps since the day the SDK was publicly available. Amazingly, that was just 3 years ago. It feels like an eternity.

Do you develop for any other platform in addition to iOS? If so, which one(s)? We’re a Mac and iOS only shop. We’ve dabbled on other platforms and will continue to keep an eye out for opportunities, but for now, Mac OS X and iOS are great places to be. A big part of that is the users—iOS and Mac users seem to appreciate high quality software.

What primary computer setup do you use for your iOS development? I use a 2010 Mac Pro with a 24″ LED Cinema Display, a couple of Drobos and lots of backup drives inside the Mac. I bought a Magic Trackpad and have tried to use it, but I keep going back to the Magic Mouse. I also have a Razer Deathadder, but use the Magic Mouse for all design related tasks. All pretty stock, really. I’m not a fan of dual displays—I’d much rather have a single, huge display.

I also have a 13″ MacBook Air for when I’m on the road. It replaces a 15″ MacBook Pro. I’m an Air convert and hope that Apple will release a 15″ MacBook Air with 3G modem (or 15″ MacBook Pro with flash drive and no optical drive).

What iOS device(s) do you personally use most often? 16GB Black iPhone 4 and 32GB 3G Black iPad 2. I have an iPod touch and a variety of older iPhone and iPads, but they’re just for testing.

What mobile devices, other than iOS, do you currently use? None. What else do you think I need? I’ve always loved the Pre, but sadly it wasn’t ever available in Australia. I’m also keen to see the TouchPad. It’s the only non-iPad tablet I’m excited about.

What’s your favorite thing about developing for iOS? Seeing your app take over the entire screen and experience is quite amazing. While open, your app is the device. It makes the software seem more physical, and the possibilities more limitless.

What’s your least favorite thing about developing for iOS? The app approval process. I can deal with time delays, but placing our entire business’ future in Apple’s hands makes me feel vulnerable. Today Apple are our partner, tomorrow they may decide we’re their competition.

What feature would you most like Apple to add to the iOS 5 SDK? Better notifications. Not an original suggestion, but a good one. Alerts are probably my least favourite part of iOS and the thing I envy most about webOS and Android devices.

What feature would you most like Apple to add to the App Store? I’m glad you asked. Being able to support older app versions is absolutely critical, and horribly broken right now. For example, if a customer buys App version 1 and we release App version 2 as a new app (the only way to charge for it), we have no way to fix bugs in version 1, while stopping people from buying it. We’re forced to choose between removing the app from sale and dealing with the consequences, or keeping it on the store and dealing with the consequences.

Removing the older version of an app stops accidental purchases, but means customers can’t redownload the app if they need to. This is one area where the App Store is far worse than the good old web download days. I see this as by far the biggest issue with the App Store. I’m hopeful that Apple will need to fix this for their own software and will add the ability to the App Store in the process.

If we were to eavesdrop on you while you were coding, what curse word would we hear you use the most? F**k you. (To which Photoshop, Xcode or iTunes Connect usually reply “No, f**k you.”)

What do you do when you’re not buidling iOS apps? Spend time with my wife, family or friends. Write music with Luc Wiesman under the name Duosseudo. Play indoor soccer (badly, usually breaking or bruising fingers while goalkeeping). Drink coffee. Play games of the iOS, Wii or Mac variety (I’m intentionally avoiding buying an Xbox or PS3 for productivity reasons). Listen to music.

What should we look for from you next? We’re busy putting the finishing touches on an iStat-related product and an iPad game we’ve been working on since 2009 (it was an iPhone game that was better suited to the iPad, so we switched as soon as the iPad was announced).

Thanks Marc!

Marc Edwards is one of the well known team behind Mac Dashboard Widget aces iSlayer and iPhone development house bjango, whose apps include Jobs, Cities, Darkness, and Phases, and he was kind enough to sit down and talk App development and ecosystem with TiPb.

TiPb: Your team is famous for their Mac OS X Dashboard widgets, was developing for the iPhone really the easy transition some have suggested?

Marc: For us, yes. Our widgets have used Cocoa plugins for quite some time. A lot of widgets are straight HTML, Javascript and CSS though, which is very different to what’s needed for iPhone apps.

Was there anything substantially different about developing for the iPhone? If so, did you learn anything that you will effect your future Mac development?

The biggest lesson seems to be quality. Apple have some great bundled apps, so if you want to fit in, you’d better make sure you spend as much time as they do on the small details. The effective hit area of a human finger also means you have can only have a small number of buttons on screen at once. That keeps you on your toes—almost everything has to be contextual, which is quite different to traditional Mac development.

With some of Apple’s built in Apps, like Stocks, Weather, etc. seeming more like OS X widgets than real Apps, there was once speculation that Apple may open up a widget platform for the iPhone as well. With both WebApps and App Store apps, do you think there’s still a place for a dedicated iPhone widget development system?

There probably isn’t much point in a development platform between web apps and App Store apps… Apple can and will keep on extending WebKit, allowing for better web apps that look and behave more like App Store apps. That’s probably enough for anyone who doesn’t want to develop using Cocoa.

So the line between the two is close enough to not warrant another choice. But hey, who knows what Apple will do!

There been ongoing controversy about the App Store and how to both get exposure for apps and earn a fair living off their development. Do you think app developers are currently racing to the bottom, and pricing themselves out of business, or do you think volume and building user base will prove a viable model long term?

I don’t think pricing is as much of an issue as others seem to. We’re talking about a platform with millions of users (don’t forget iPod touch users when adding up the total). A huge portion of those users seem to buy apps.

If anything, I think we will see some more expensive apps appear, as all the small ideas get done well enough that each app type has a clear winner. Once the low hanging fruit is gone, developers will probably head towards bigger projects.

Either way, I’m not sure less than $5 is a bad pricepoint for an app. Just make sure you have a very good, very small team developing it and you’ll be fine.

Now that the numbers are approaching 10,000, what could Apple do to make iPhone apps more discoverable by end users?

Search results ordered by rankings. A “newly popular” section might work too. I think it’s going to be fairly difficult to keep iTunes as it is for music while making it work for the App Store too. I’m sure they’ll figure it out though. These kinds of things have been working well on web 2.0 sites for years.

What are your thoughts on the new “rate upon deletion” feature of iPhone OS 2.2? Is this unfair to developers who may get more negative reviews now? (fair disclosure, I’ve only give 4 and 5 star reviews to Apps I’ve deleted).

For Apple to build better search and ranking tools, they need all the good data they can get. Right now there’s a lot of fairly average apps on the store, so I don’t see how rate upon deletion should be something any decent developer should worry about.

I’ve also rated some apps well on deletion. Maybe a rate after 20th launch would be good too, although you don’t want it to get in the way too much.

Thanks Marc, we really appreciate your taking the time!

bjango is the website, and the apps are all available via the iPhone App Store (iTunes Link)