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Indonesians had a new way to show their patriotism on Independence Day this year — a BlackBerry application.

Garuda di BBku, or Garuda on my BB, was created by developer 7Langit and has five features designed to invoke a patriotic spirit in an interactive way, including a karaoke function with nationalist songs and a fact feed of historical events about Independence Day on Aug. 17.

The app features the Garuda, national coat of arms as its logo.

7Langit co-founder Titi Rusdi said she and her team had always believed digital media could provide an alternative to more traditional ways of stoking national pride among the youth.

“The rise of the Internet and social networking tools allows for a digital revolution to motivate people to say they’re proud of being Indonesian,” Titi told the Jakarta Globe on Friday.

She said that since the app’s release on Aug. 2 it had been downloaded by 22,000 users, out of the estimated 1.5 million BlackBerry users countrywide.

“We developed the app primarily to mark Independence Day, but we’ll keep on developing and improving its features,” Titi said.

Nurul Yakin Setiabudi, chairman of the Telecommunications Users Group, welcomed the increase in the number of apps being developed locally, particularly those that were “educative and invoke nationalism.”

It took the team at 7Langit some time to brainstorm and finalize the idea before beginning to develop the app.

The process that took about a month and involved many experts from various fields and interests, such as financial planner Ligwina Hananto and online marketing consultant Nukman Luthfie.

Their tweets are featured in the Channel section of the app with Garuda hashtag (#garuda).

“We had very little time to make all the necessary legal arrangements for featuring the independence tunes because we had to seek consent of the copyright holders and re-record them for the karaoke type-along challenge,” Titi said.

She said the feedback from users had been positive, with some saying that the app had revived their to pride in the country. Titi said users had also showered her team with ideas to improve it.

Titi said the most popular feature was the karaoke type-along challenge.

Mustika Kusumaningtyas, a marketing manager for a satellite television company, was another fan.

“I think this is a real breakthrough for a BlackBerry app,” said Mustika, who said shehas used it often.

She said it had helped give a festive mood to Independence Day, which “I’ve rarely felt since high school.”

“The lyrics of the songs and the historical facts reminded me why we need to love our country,” she said.