Back in the mid-2000s there was a golden era of exuberantly designed Mac apps. Paul Kafasis coined it “The Delicious Generation”, a perfect name. The delicious was both a reference to Wil Shipley and Mike Matas’s Delicious Library — a personal media library management app that made something that sounds really boring look super fun — and a perfect description of the aesthetic. It clearly harks back to Steve Jobs’s description of the Aqua user interface in 2000: “One of the design goals was when you saw it, you wanted to lick it.”
One of the delicious generation apps was Disco, a CD/DVD disc-burning utility. When it burned a disc, it rendered smoke coming out of the app’s main window. It wasn’t a simple “poof” animation. It was fully interactive. From their own description:
With Disco we tried pushing the boundaries of interface, usability, and utter functional simplicity. Well, once you realize that Disco is emitting real time interactive smoke as you burn, we start redefining the boundaries. Want to push it out of the way? Blow into your microphone and the smoke will react accordingly. Or, go ahead and flick at it with your mouse. Remember, you’ll need a recent Mac to play with the full interactive smoke.
Here’s a video of Disco in action.
Another delicious generation peer was AppZapper, from Austin Sarner and Brian Ball. AppZapper was a utility to uninstall apps along with all of the apps’ associated files and folders, and its gimmick was that, well, you zapped the apps with a Zap button and a supposedly fun sound. Totally boring premise with a fun implementation and presentation.
Two things brought that trend to an end. The first was the launch of the iPhone App Store in 2008. Indie developer attention that had previously been single-mindedly focused on the Mac was now split between the Mac and iPhone, and given the iPhone’s novelty and larger market, it soon was more like the attention went single-mindedly to the iPhone. The delicious aesthetic was a niche novelty on the Mac. On the iPhone, in those early years, it was the aesthetic of the platform. Apple’s own iBooks app had page-turning animation that tracked your finger; the built-in Calendar app had a UI rendered in rich Corinthian leather; the Notes app used a silly handwriting font. But then iOS 7 arrived in 2013, wiping the slate clean. Deliciousness was out. Blandness was in. And the whole industry has never really recovered.1
I bring very good, very fun news. After a decade-plus hiatus, AppZapper is back, perfectly renamed for a long future as AppZapper 3000. It’s completely over-the-top and I love it. Just look at it.
There’s long been a whole cottage industry of Mac “app uninstallers”, a sort of subset within the larger category of system “cleaners”. Some of these apps are scams, and some are borderline scams that prey on the false notion that users should be worried about the detritus that deleted apps leave behind. A lot of people who come to the Mac from Windows are uncomfortable with the idea that you don’t typically run installers for apps — you just copy the .app bundle from your Downloads folder or from a disk image to your Applications folder, and that’s it. It’s installed. It’s a beautiful system, to me, because it teaches you how the system works. There ought not be any hidden magic behind “installing” an app on the Mac.
And to uninstall an app, you just drag it to the Trash. Some users are more uncomfortable with that than they are with just-drag-to-Applications-to-install, because deleting the application’s .app bundle doesn’t delete anything else it might have left behind. Like its preferences, or any associated files it might have left behind in subfolders within your ~/Library/ folder. The simple truth is that you don’t really need to worry about that stuff. I sometimes prefer leaving a deleted app’s preferences behind, just in case I ever re-install the app. The Mac’s NeXT-derived defaults system for software preferences is designed such that it doesn’t get bogged down by unused preferences from long-ago deleted applications. (The Windows Registry leaves people forever scarred.)
But sometimes apps download large associated files and stash them in ~/Library/. Those files aren’t bogging your system down but they are taking up space. Storage space has never been free of charge, and, on one side of the AI coin, it’s become a lot more expensive. On the other side of the AI coin, there are a lot more new Mac apps coming out these days. I’m trying more new apps every week than I have since the earliest days of the App Store. Sometimes I really just want to nuke all traces of them after taking a test drive.
AppZapper 3000 does that job well, and it makes it fun as hell. You drag an app you want to uninstall to its main window, and AppZapper lists all of the app’s associated files (including, of course, the app itself). Then you shoot the ones you want to delete. Zapped files are safely moved to your Trash, and AppZapper itself supports Undo if you get trigger happy. It’s terrific fun. There’s even a “Zap All” button for the lazy. It re-launched last Monday but I’ve been testing AppZapper 300 since a few weeks before that. My Applications and Library folders haven’t been this trim in years.
Way, way back in the day with The Grouch system extension for System 6 and 7, there were stories claiming that people who had the Grouch installed would let their young kids play with their Macs, and come to find that the kids had deleted gobs of important files and folders, just to make Oscar pop out of the Trash and sing his songs. (Oscar only sang when you emptied the Trash.) The Grouch seemed old even when the original AppZapper was new. But AppZapper 3000 brings back that sort of fun — while being genuinely useful. And the Mac has never in its history been more in need of new UI fun. Is it absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary to make an uninstall utility with an exquisitely detailed 3D laser gun as its UI? Fuckin’-A right it is.
If you’ve got a fun bone in your body you should check AppZapper 3000 out. It’s a free download with a free trial. Licenses cost $18 for a single user, $29 for a 5-user family pack, and $99 for a 25-Mac enterprise license. One-time purchases, not subscriptions. Sarner was kind enough to create a 20 percent discount code for DF readers, good through next Monday: DARING. This is not a sponsorship. I’m sharing this code (and writing this article) simply because I’m so happy to see such a much-needed injection of pure fun on the Mac.
Delicious — dare I say lickable — hardware never fell out of fashion at Apple. But I think that was, in a very small nut, the core problem with Jony Ive taking control of all design at the company. With a hardware designer in charge of software design, of course the aesthetic changed to one where the software look-and-feel deferred to the hardware. In the 2000s, if you asked me what was more exciting, just to look at, Apple’s hardware or software, I’d have to say “I don’t know.” They both were full of exuberance. They both continued to surprise and delight. Starting with iOS 7, and ever since, the answer is clearly “Oh, the hardware.”
At a first approximation, the problem with Liquid Glass last year is that it just plain sucked. In the way that Donald Trump is a poor idiot’s idea of a rich genius, Liquid Glass exemplifies bad graphic designers’ idea of a good user interface. But looking deeper, the real problem with Liquid Glass is the lack of ambition. Even a good implemention of the ideas behind Liquid Glass — which we’re starting to see Apple incrementally edge toward in this year’s version 27 OS releases — is still fundamentally bland. It aspires only to see-through blandness. The whole point is for the application chrome to defer to “content”, which necessarily results in applications that look shy. They all look alike. Even their icons suck. A good user interface is obvious, consistent, efficient, functional etc. But an insanely great user interface is one that makes you want to use the software not because of what it does but just because it looks so goddamn cool. That’s not instead of actually getting fundamental functionality right. It’s on top of it. But Apple stopped striving for insanely great UIs like that. And, alas, everyone followed. ↩︎
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