Summary

Gruber revisits the 'Delicious Generation' of mid-2000s Mac apps — exuberantly designed software that made mundane tasks visually delightful — and mourns how the iPhone App Store and then iOS 7 killed that aesthetic industry-wide. He celebrates the return of AppZapper, the original fun-but-functional uninstall utility, now reborn as AppZapper 3000 with a deliberately over-the-top 3D laser gun interface. Along the way he explains the legitimate (if often overhyped) use case for Mac app uninstallers, particularly as AI-era apps and rising storage costs make thorough cleanup more valuable. The review doubles as a critique of Apple's design trajectory since Jony Ive took over software: Liquid Glass and the era of deferential, see-through blandness represent a failure of ambition, not just execution. Gruber's core argument is that great software should make you want to use it purely because it looks cool — and the Mac is long overdue for more of that.

Key Insight

The Mac's decades-long drift toward blandness represents a failure of design ambition at Apple and across the industry, and AppZapper 3000's gleeful absurdity is a small but meaningful counter-signal that fun, lick-it software can still exist.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 7

  Deliciousness was out. Blandness was in. And the whole industry has never really recovered.

• 9

  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.

• 6

  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.

• 7

  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.

• 6

  The Mac has never in its history been more in need of new UI fun.

• 7

  Apple stopped striving for insanely great UIs like that. And, alas, everyone followed.

• 8

  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.

• 7

  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.

Tone

nostalgic, enthusiastic, opinionated