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Delicious Library was the start of a gilded age of Mac shareware focused on style over substance. > In the past year or so, Mac development had shifted from ap

Delicious Library was the start of a gilded age of Mac shareware focused on style over substance. > In the past year or so, Mac development had shifted from applications providing new functionality that appeared at the dawn of OS X to applications (and ideas) built around flash and sizzle, with plenty of marketing hype to fuel the fire. his had created something of a toxic atmosphere in the Mac development world. A rift between the old school, with its plain but functional apps, and the new school of flashy but frivolous apps, has developed. ... I dubbed this new school “The Delicious Generation”. https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2006/11/06/the-delicious-generation/ https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2006/11/06/the-delicious-gene... Apple adopted a similar interface for Newsstand on iOS and it seemed to be widely reviled during the pushback against skeuomorphism.

saagarjha 2y ago
This is amusing to read now because this post bemoans the transition from useful applications to pretty ones. Little did they know the next stop in that line was that the pretty applications became not so pretty without picking up anything new. Mac software today would leave you begging for a Delicious Library…
- wmf 2y ago
  Or we could admit that UI design didn't start in 2004 and skeuomorphism vs. flat is a false dichotomy.
- Hamuko 2y ago
  I think the worst part of modern Mac software is that there really isn't any. More often than not new software is just the web application wrapped in Electron.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    In my view MacOS has the healthiest native software market of any OS. What software is missing? I have state of the art native text editors, photo editors, music production programs, calendars, e-mail, etc.
    - akho 2y ago
      Empiric evidence suggests that macOs does not have any interesting software. People go to great lengths to run Windows programs (through Wine, Steam Proton, VM integrations), and Linux stuff (Docker desktop, WSL/WSLG, X servers). macOs stuff seems to be too useless for that kind of effort.
      - carlosjobim 2y ago
        Those users aren't really what I would consider "people", and they should probably use Linux if they want to run software that is especially designed for that platform, such as Docker. Of course if your requirement is that you use specialized Linux tools, then anything that is not Linux will not satisfy you.
        akho 2y ago
        > Those users aren't really what I would consider "people" I think you want to edit that. Apart from that piece of advice, I don’t see how your comment relates to mine, and have nothing to add.
        carlosjobim 2y ago
        You're focusing on tools and not on outcomes in your previous post. The purpose of a computer is not to use a certain tool, but to achieve a result. The purpose of a car is not to burn a certain kind of fuel, but to transport people. What matters is if it can do that and with what comfort and what cost. Macs are lacking compared to other platforms when it comes to games, which everybody admits. You can say that it is lacking as a server, but I would doubt that. More expensive yes, but you could serve anything you'd like from it if you want to. When it comes to very industry specific software, which is used by maybe 3 companies worldwide, those applications do not have any importance for comparing platforms.
        akho 2y ago
        In that sense (having software for the most common of activities), all mainstream OSes (and some non-mainstream ones) have a “healthy native app ecosystem”. This is pointless copium. What matters is stuff for which there are no workable alternatives elsewhere. I can try and write a condescending automotive metaphor, if you like those, but I’d prefer not to.
tpmoney 2y ago
A weird complaint given that Delicious Library had plenty of substance behind it, including barcode scanning with web cameras back when that was novel.
- gyomu 2y ago
  Yes, I’m also really confused by this criticism. Delicious Library was a super useful, featureful piece of software?
  - draw_down 2y ago
    [dead]
m463 2y ago
I thought it was wonderful until I realized all the amazon links were rewritten to be amazon associate links (even though I paid for the app)
- swiftcoder 2y ago
  Does that actually negatively affect your use of the app?
  - m463 2y ago
    come on. How do you feel when the television you bought uploads your viewing history for profit? Or the car you purchased sells your driving habits? This app was purchased, there was no "this is FREE because we can see and sell your whole cd/book collection info"
    - swiftcoder 2y ago
      > How do you feel when the television you bought uploads your viewing history for profit? Or the car you purchased sells your driving habits? I mean, I don't disagree on a philosophical level, but on a day-to-day I'm fairly stuck using both of those things. The world we live in is obviously less than ideal, and I'm not sure I'd condemn a small software developer out of hand for participating in capitalism...
kalleboo 2y ago
When I reminisce with people about that age, we mostly fondly remember how much fun software still was back then. Sure Disco was just a thin veneer over OS functionality but it was absolutely hilarious when you ran it. I still miss Apple's "shredder" animation when removing items from the iOS 6 Apple Passbook, and how OS X widgets had this crazy water ripple effect when you dropped them.
- rgovostes 2y ago
  There was definitely a whimsicality in Mac OS going far back, both first- and third-party, that has receded lately. I miss Time Machine's wormhole animation, the iOS 6 pull-to-refresh "booger", and the Shift-key slow-motion modifier. The new iPhone Mirroring app exemplifies this. A few years ago, Apple would have given it a fun name like Magic Mirror or Teleport. Instead we got an unimaginative name and an icon with a grey background and a centered image of an iPhone. Clever.
  - Hamuko 2y ago
    I feel like Time Machine is still too whimsical, especially how it blacks out every monitor except your primary one whenever you try to restore files. And restoring files takes a while as it tries to load your backups from some spinning rust.
  - gyomu 2y ago
    > A few years ago, Apple would have given it a fun name like Magic Mirror or Teleport. A few years ago, Apple would have never shipped such a feature because the conventional design wisdom within the company would be that the user problems that this solution aims to solve can be better solved in other ways (that’s why we got features like handoff, continuity, etc). A feature like this shipping is indicative of a greater mindset shift - perhaps a greater willingness to interpret user requests more literally (not too dissimilar from the MacBook Pro redesign going back to having all the ports). People want faster horses? Well let’s breed faster horses for them, we’ve got the best horse breeding program in the world!
al_borland 2y ago
I was a happy Disco user. A lot of the Mac apps from that era were fun and made me want to find excuses to use them, rather than look for excuses to avoid what might otherwise feel like work. In the case of Delicious Library that would be the unpleasantness that would most likely be using a spreadsheet to track similar data and a lot of manual data entry. Going the opposite way with discs, to rip my DVD collection at the time, I used RitIt. While the UI was seemingly unnecessary, it is initially what led me to find the concept of ripping all my DVDs more tolerable. After the novelty wore off, it had a feature to automatically start ripping on a disc being inserted, and would auto-eject at the end. This let me keep a stack of DVDs next to the computer and simply feed in the next disc when I saw one sticking out. After a few days I was done. I probably would have put this off for years (or forever) with more utilitarian software. The same can be said for AppZapper. Is it silly to make a ray gun sound when uninstalling an app, sure, but it makes it fun to delete unused apps, which is something a lot of people never do. Where I think some of this software really got a bad name was so much of it becoming abandonware. TheHitList todo app was really hyped, and I got it in a software bundle (MacHeist or something), which was popular at the time. However, it seemed like once the dev had their money, they disappeared. Once burned me a couple times, I became wary of investing in any app that looked too nice… I do miss a lot of those apps, and the hardware, of that era. It has so much charm. Great third party software devs who seemed to really have passion for what they were building, were one of the big reasons I enjoyed using OS X so much in that era, and a big reason to pay the Apple tax. I still use Transmit from Panic from time to time, and find it much more enjoyable than something like FileZilla (which was what seemed to be the standard last time I looked at other FTP apps years ago).

saagarjha 2y ago

This is amusing to read now because this post bemoans the transition from useful applications to pretty ones. Little did they know the next stop in that line was that the pretty applications became not so pretty without picking up anything new. Mac software today would leave you begging for a Delicious Library…

wmf 2y ago
Or we could admit that UI design didn't start in 2004 and skeuomorphism vs. flat is a false dichotomy.
Hamuko 2y ago
I think the worst part of modern Mac software is that there really isn't any. More often than not new software is just the web application wrapped in Electron.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  In my view MacOS has the healthiest native software market of any OS. What software is missing? I have state of the art native text editors, photo editors, music production programs, calendars, e-mail, etc.
  - akho 2y ago
    Empiric evidence suggests that macOs does not have any interesting software. People go to great lengths to run Windows programs (through Wine, Steam Proton, VM integrations), and Linux stuff (Docker desktop, WSL/WSLG, X servers). macOs stuff seems to be too useless for that kind of effort.
    - carlosjobim 2y ago
      Those users aren't really what I would consider "people", and they should probably use Linux if they want to run software that is especially designed for that platform, such as Docker. Of course if your requirement is that you use specialized Linux tools, then anything that is not Linux will not satisfy you.
      - akho 2y ago
        > Those users aren't really what I would consider "people" I think you want to edit that. Apart from that piece of advice, I don’t see how your comment relates to mine, and have nothing to add.
        carlosjobim 2y ago
        You're focusing on tools and not on outcomes in your previous post. The purpose of a computer is not to use a certain tool, but to achieve a result. The purpose of a car is not to burn a certain kind of fuel, but to transport people. What matters is if it can do that and with what comfort and what cost. Macs are lacking compared to other platforms when it comes to games, which everybody admits. You can say that it is lacking as a server, but I would doubt that. More expensive yes, but you could serve anything you'd like from it if you want to. When it comes to very industry specific software, which is used by maybe 3 companies worldwide, those applications do not have any importance for comparing platforms.
        akho 2y ago
        In that sense (having software for the most common of activities), all mainstream OSes (and some non-mainstream ones) have a “healthy native app ecosystem”. This is pointless copium. What matters is stuff for which there are no workable alternatives elsewhere. I can try and write a condescending automotive metaphor, if you like those, but I’d prefer not to.

tpmoney 2y ago

A weird complaint given that Delicious Library had plenty of substance behind it, including barcode scanning with web cameras back when that was novel.

gyomu 2y ago
Yes, I’m also really confused by this criticism. Delicious Library was a super useful, featureful piece of software?
- draw_down 2y ago
  [dead]

m463 2y ago

I thought it was wonderful until I realized all the amazon links were rewritten to be amazon associate links (even though I paid for the app)

swiftcoder 2y ago
Does that actually negatively affect your use of the app?
- m463 2y ago
  come on. How do you feel when the television you bought uploads your viewing history for profit? Or the car you purchased sells your driving habits? This app was purchased, there was no "this is FREE because we can see and sell your whole cd/book collection info"
  - swiftcoder 2y ago
    > How do you feel when the television you bought uploads your viewing history for profit? Or the car you purchased sells your driving habits? I mean, I don't disagree on a philosophical level, but on a day-to-day I'm fairly stuck using both of those things. The world we live in is obviously less than ideal, and I'm not sure I'd condemn a small software developer out of hand for participating in capitalism...

kalleboo 2y ago

When I reminisce with people about that age, we mostly fondly remember how much fun software still was back then. Sure Disco was just a thin veneer over OS functionality but it was absolutely hilarious when you ran it. I still miss Apple's "shredder" animation when removing items from the iOS 6 Apple Passbook, and how OS X widgets had this crazy water ripple effect when you dropped them.

rgovostes 2y ago
There was definitely a whimsicality in Mac OS going far back, both first- and third-party, that has receded lately. I miss Time Machine's wormhole animation, the iOS 6 pull-to-refresh "booger", and the Shift-key slow-motion modifier. The new iPhone Mirroring app exemplifies this. A few years ago, Apple would have given it a fun name like Magic Mirror or Teleport. Instead we got an unimaginative name and an icon with a grey background and a centered image of an iPhone. Clever.
- Hamuko 2y ago
  I feel like Time Machine is still too whimsical, especially how it blacks out every monitor except your primary one whenever you try to restore files. And restoring files takes a while as it tries to load your backups from some spinning rust.
- gyomu 2y ago
  > A few years ago, Apple would have given it a fun name like Magic Mirror or Teleport. A few years ago, Apple would have never shipped such a feature because the conventional design wisdom within the company would be that the user problems that this solution aims to solve can be better solved in other ways (that’s why we got features like handoff, continuity, etc). A feature like this shipping is indicative of a greater mindset shift - perhaps a greater willingness to interpret user requests more literally (not too dissimilar from the MacBook Pro redesign going back to having all the ports). People want faster horses? Well let’s breed faster horses for them, we’ve got the best horse breeding program in the world!

al_borland 2y ago

I was a happy Disco user. A lot of the Mac apps from that era were fun and made me want to find excuses to use them, rather than look for excuses to avoid what might otherwise feel like work. In the case of Delicious Library that would be the unpleasantness that would most likely be using a spreadsheet to track similar data and a lot of manual data entry. Going the opposite way with discs, to rip my DVD collection at the time, I used RitIt. While the UI was seemingly unnecessary, it is initially what led me to find the concept of ripping all my DVDs more tolerable. After the novelty wore off, it had a feature to automatically start ripping on a disc being inserted, and would auto-eject at the end. This let me keep a stack of DVDs next to the computer and simply feed in the next disc when I saw one sticking out. After a few days I was done. I probably would have put this off for years (or forever) with more utilitarian software. The same can be said for AppZapper. Is it silly to make a ray gun sound when uninstalling an app, sure, but it makes it fun to delete unused apps, which is something a lot of people never do. Where I think some of this software really got a bad name was so much of it becoming abandonware. TheHitList todo app was really hyped, and I got it in a software bundle (MacHeist or something), which was popular at the time. However, it seemed like once the dev had their money, they disappeared. Once burned me a couple times, I became wary of investing in any app that looked too nice… I do miss a lot of those apps, and the hardware, of that era. It has so much charm. Great third party software devs who seemed to really have passion for what they were building, were one of the big reasons I enjoyed using OS X so much in that era, and a big reason to pay the Apple tax. I still use Transmit from Panic from time to time, and find it much more enjoyable than something like FileZilla (which was what seemed to be the standard last time I looked at other FTP apps years ago).