ZDNET editor says he shipped a paid Mac app in 11 days using Claude without code
A ZDNET editor says he used Claude to build and launch a paid Mac app in 11 days without writing code. The project turned a 30-year-old icon library into an App Store product and required 502 directives.
The app, Icon Gallery '97, grew out of a 30-year-old icon library. The editor had founded a software company and launched Icon Factory for HyperCard, a black-and-white product that won awards and supported the company for years. In 1997, after customer requests for colorful Finder desktop icons, the company created Icon Gallery, a three-volume set of more than 2,000 32-by-32-pixel color icons sold through retail, mail order, distribution and direct mail. It was one of his last boxed software products. He wrote that he cannot recall exactly when or why he stopped selling it, but it probably tracked with the end of physical boxed manufacturing and the rise of the web.
Months before the app idea, while decluttering his office, he found packaging for old software products, including Icon Gallery, and put it on a shelf. Last month, while writing historical Apple stories for ZDNET after the iPhone event, he searched his server for an old AI product image and also found a Macromedia Director file containing all 2,338 icons from three decades earlier. In the mid-1990s, he had converted Icon Gallery's icons into Director format and sold them to animators as an asset library; Director eventually faded from Mac history.
On Sept. 2, he gave the old Director file to Claude with a simple prompt asking the AI to separate the icons into their own folder. Claude asked what format he wanted and whether white edge pixels should be transparent. The process took four minutes and 30 steps, producing more than 2,000 PNG images organized into topic folders. The extracted files sat on his desktop for 18 days.
On Sunday afternoon, Sept. 20, while needing a graphic, he thought an app for browsing and resizing the icons would be useful. He worked in Claude Desktop for strategy and Claude Code to build the Mac app. Within a few hours, he had a working app that could browse the original library and create scaled, hard-edge bitmap icons from 32 by 32 pixels up to 1,024 by 1,024 pixels. It was a proof of concept.
Claude then recommended productizing it as Icon Gallery '97: 30th Anniversary Edition, leaning into the hand-created retro icons as a contrast to AI-generated art. The AI also suggested a recoloring feature so designers could match brand or identity colors, plus collections and favorites. A friend recommended an Export to Slack feature because the retro icons could work as Slack emojis, and his wife saw potential for dragging icons into texts. He made sure those features were included.
The account's key takeaways say the project required 502 directives, not one magic prompt, and that App Store promotional images took almost as long as the app itself. The app was accepted by Apple four days after submission and went live on the App Store.