A ZDNET editor has released a paid Mac app called Icon Gallery '97: 30th Anniversary Edition, built with Anthropic's Claude and without the editor writing any code. The app was submitted to Apple on Sept. 27, four days after the idea was formed and accepted by Apple four days later, and is now live on the App Store. The editor reported the work was done in Claude Desktop for strategy and Claude Code for building the Mac app.
The project started on Sept. 2, when the editor used Claude to extract 2,338 icons from an old Macromedia Director file. Claude asked only about file format and whether white edge pixels should be transparent, and the log showed the process took four minutes and 30 steps, producing more than 2,000 PNG images sorted into topic folders. The icons came from Icon Gallery, a three-volume boxed set of 32x32 pixel color icons the editor created in 1997 for software his company made, which had been converted to Director format in the mid-1990s.
The editor found the Director file months ago while decluttering his office and later located it on his Mac Studio desktop while writing historical Apple stories. The idea for the app came on the afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 20, when he needed a graphic and thought a tool to browse and resize the old icons would be useful. Within a few hours he had a working Mac app that browses the library and creates hard-edge bitmap icons scaled from 32x32 pixels up to 1,024x1,024 pixels.
Claude recommended naming the app Icon Gallery '97: 30th Anniversary Edition to highlight its hand-created retro icons, a contrast to AI-generated art. The AI also suggested adding a recoloring feature so designers could match brand or identity colors, plus collections and favorites. A friend recommended an Export to Slack feature for use as Slack emojis, and the editor's wife saw potential for dragging icons into texts, so both features were included.
Because favorites and collections raised the question of using the app on another Mac, iCloud syncing was added as well. Icon Gallery '97 joins a growing set of Apple platform projects the editor has documented, including an iPhone app, an Apple Watch app and an iOS app built with voice input, all developed with Claude. The app's release follows the editor's earlier account of using Claude Code to vibe code a Mac app in eight hours, which he described as more work than magic.
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