David Gewirtz says he built Icon Gallery ’97, a Mac app for browsing and exporting vintage icons, with Claude Desktop and Claude Code. His account describes a project that moved from idea to App Store submission in about a week, with Apple accepting it four days later—and 502 individual directives, testing and debugging along the way.
A recovered icon archive became the starting point
The project began with a recovered Macromedia Director file containing 2,338 icons, according to Gewirtz. He says Claude extracted more than 2,000 of them as PNG files in a task that took four minutes and 30 steps.
The icons came from a boxed collection his company created in 1997: a three-volume set with more than 2,000 color icons, each 32 × 32 pixels. Gewirtz says the idea for a Mac app followed as he considered ways to browse and resize the recovered artwork.
502 directives shaped the app
Gewirtz says he wrote no code for Icon Gallery ’97. He used Claude Desktop for strategy and Claude Code to build the app, giving the coding tool 502 individual directives across four active days. Those were days of active interaction, not four uninterrupted workdays.
The project grew beyond a simple icon browser. The app’s features include searching and browsing categories, resizing and recoloring icons, saving favorites and collections, dragging icons into other apps, and exporting them for Slack emoji. The US App Store listing also describes iCloud syncing for favorites, collections and saved recolors.
The recovered file’s 2,338 icons and the 2,146 icons Gewirtz says went into the app belong to different stages of the project. The original set was also built for a very different screen era: the app’s described resizing range runs from 32 × 32 to 1,024 × 1,024 pixels.
Testing exposed asset and performance issues
Gewirtz says he encrypted the app’s icon assets into a single scrambled file, with icons unscrambled as the app needed them. To check the process, he deliberately corrupted copies and compared the decrypted output with the originals.
He also describes investigating slow scrolling. In one case, full-size images were being reduced for previews; in another, a code path rebuilt the window 482 times during a single resize request. Those are concrete debugging problems from this project—not a performance score. The important part of the work was identifying what the app was doing and testing changes against the actual behavior.
App Store preparation meant more than generating code
The release involved product and submission decisions too. Gewirtz says he removed a Caterpillar logo, a face resembling Charlie Brown, and gunshot icons while considering App Store review and the artwork’s provenance.
He tried an alternative design on a separate Git branch, then reverted it when he preferred the earlier version. He also says he used screenshots of submission screens to get guidance and ran adversarial agents that surfaced issues to fix.
Promotional artwork became a project of its own: Gewirtz says he spent three days making the graphics manually in Photoshop after Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT did not produce suitable results for that task. He also recounts uploading 21 TestFlight builds on one Wednesday, from 6:49 a.m. to 9:20 p.m. Apple refused the 22nd upload and required a full-day wait, which he says pushed the project back a day.
What the US App Store listing says
Apple’s US listing for Icon Gallery ’97 describes a free download with 100 icons available to try and a $29.99 in-app purchase to unlock the full library. It lists macOS 14.0 or later as the system requirement.
The listing describes exports from 32 to 1,024 pixels and says whole-step enlargement preserves sharp pixel edges. That gives the app’s US storefront terms and requirements; the development timeline and workload remain Gewirtz’s account of this particular project.
