It's a nice idea, and seems well executed. To be honest, and I hope this isn't too much of a downer:
a) I probably won't pay to evaluate it. It seems like the kind of app that would be perfect for a cut-down trial version.
b) I wonder how many people - especially this audience - really care about what's on their desktop. I know I barely ever see mine, because I run all windows maximised (or tiled). It's nice to have a good looking image for the brief period of startup/shutdown time during which I can actually see it, and I plump for the Mountain Lion-era space image because I think it's a lot more attractive than the recent mavericks/yosemite equivalents. But anything more, in my book, is overkill.
A trial version is a great idea. I didn't want to split my time too much, but maybe I'll release a free version with a limited range of artists (the all van Gogh, all the time app?).
How many people care about art on their desktop? I don't know either! Seeing more art can only be a good thing. It's a discovery tool for me. I've chanced my Mission Control preferences so I can quickly show the desktop by moving my mouse cursor to the lower left hot corner of my screen.
I kind of take some time to time to see online arts, just for curiosity. Definitely would like to give a go with the free app with van Gogh. Not sure I would like to pay though, for financial reasons. Great idea though.
"wonder how many people - especially this audience - really care about what's on their desktop."
I do. The duller, the better. Uniform gray is my preferred background (not too bright red on production systems or when logged in as administrator).
Pictures I liked had 'dull' parts in regions where icons tend to show up. An option to reduce (color) contrast would be a nice feature, especially if it were to have some smarts depending on the picture and what icons are on the desktop.
Have you seen the Android wallpaper app Muzei [0] ? It dims and blurs the image, and launching the app or double tapping the wallpaper itself brightens and focuses the picture momentarily. No idea if that is possible on OS X though.
Difficult to implement something like that on OSX without a resource-intensive overlay. As it is, Artful takes advantage of the built-in NSWorkspace API to change the wallpaper, which only causes activity on download and change of the image.
Sorry, I was aware my comment might come across as too negative, but still thought it might offer useful feedback and a kicking-off point for conversation. I agree that a whole slew of "this is crap" posts is the last thing anyone wants, and I would never post something consisting solely of that, but a series of "this is great" posts is almost as worthless.
Definitely needs option too offline cache and not use the net connection, I do not want to have my cable trickle saturated by downloading hi-res images indefinitely in the background!
Assuming someone changes the image every 5 minutes, you'd cover 12/hour or 288/day. Would maintaining a FIFO queue of one day's worth of images be crazy big? I think it's reasonable to expect a person's computer to have internet access once a day to refill the queue.
Make it configurable? But I'd probably suggest a default somewhere around the 1GB mark - Apple are still selling machines with as little as ~120GB storage.
That's a great point! My test monitors don't rotate, but I used to have a config like that. I'll add orientation preferences to a future version!
If you have a mixed set of monitor orientations, would you prefer to have a different art piece on each one, suited to the respective orientation, or a piece that tries to fit both (restricting the art to near-square works)?
This is awesome. I'm always looking for ways to discover high quality images for wallpaper use. I actually wrote this thing that auto-grabs the latest Shorpy.com image and sets it as your wallpaper: https://github.com/nicksergeant/shorpypaper.
This is my first app on the Mac App store, and my first Swift app. It was something to scratch my own itch. I wanted to be exposed to more art and knew that the best way was to have it right in front of me on the computer, so I collected public domain art and made an app to periodically display a random work as the wallpaper. So far my favorite artist discovered this way is Giovanni Battista Piranesi, for his etchings of Rome. My girlfriend describes the app as "Pandora for art." Once there are enough users, I have plans to roll out a collaborative filtering system. (Slope one-based? Tips there would be great)
I'm interested in hearing about the experience others have had with the Mac app store. I've been giving away promo codes, and that seems to have helped sales by word-of-mouth. Although the app appeared on the daily "Top Paid" and "Top Grossing" chart for its category, that happened with only low double-digit purchase counts. It seems there are fewer people using Mac app store than the iOS store.
Feedback is welcome, and I still have a few free codes left if anyone would like to try it without buying. I set the price point at $5 because it covers my costs (AWS mostly), it's less than an art museum admission, and it is about the same as a Starbucks coffee (hopefully within impulse range for many).
Oh yes, please send a code to alandarev _at_ gmail.com :)
Once for having no other option, I glued together RSS feeds + deviant arts + rotate background from a folder... It worked quite well, but some unfiltered deviant art publications were upsetting me, plus a painful maintenance...
It looks pretty cool, if you still have any promotional codes I'd love one.
As a random suggestion I feel like if your 'WHY' is something like to "effortlessly inspire with great art during normal computer use" rather than just focussing on an app that changes your desktop background. I like your collaborative filtering idea, and if you're taking feature requests a screensaver/multiplatform port would be nice (e.g. if every time I open my phone the lockscreen background is a different work of art its a pretty effortless way to get more exposure) ;)
Thanks for the suggestion on copy. Please email me for a code (info is in my HN profile).
I'll have to learn more about what it would take to make a screensaver. Unfortunately the iOS APIs do not seem to expose any programmatic way to change the background or lock screen (I'd love it on my phone too!).
I did something similar as a screensaver for the Mac, but it's some hack based on Webkit, it's stored locally and the range of artists is more limited.
I'd love if Apple allowed this in iOS, but I'm not holding my breath
It is not currently caching, because the collection is so large (30+GB) that it would be difficult to distribute in its entirety, and since items are unlikely to repeat if all filters are off. I'll have to think about adding local caching for the case when filters are selected. For now, I'd suggest pausing it while tethering (Anyone have suggestions for detecting tethering from the Mac side?).
Each of the network interfaces have different identifiers and you can get info about them.
Also maybe helpful, many of the apple BSD utilities have a `-C` and `-E` options to prevent binding to a cellular or "expensive" interfaces. For example, `netcat` has this, and is open sourced (part of Darwin), so you can poke around and see how they do it.
In case you do decide you want to provide the option of downloading the whole thing, I would suggest bittorrent as the right tool for the job (basically it would avoid you having to pay most of the bandwidth cost).
I've been thinking about whipping up a Swift App, but I haven't found many online resources on how to do one for OS X. I tried following an ObjC guide and translating it all to Swift, but my lack of experience really slowed me down.
Did you come across any good guides for making Swift Apps in OS X?
I came to it as a mostly Python/embedded C/C++ developer, and learned by translating ObjC examples to Swift. The Apple docs are pretty good, and for anything I couldn't find in the docs I searched for an ObjC example, often on StackOverflow. The most difficult part for me was working around the sandboxing restrictions, particularly for starting an app on login (after trying different approaches I learned that it requires a secondary helper app and a simple call to SMLoginItemSetEnabled() ).
Fair enough. There are a lot of nudes in art history though (and depictions of Jesus), especially among public domain works. To be comprehensive, I'd have to go through and manually tag as nude/non-nude, which I have not yet done. Something for the future, perhaps when collaborative filtering gets rolled in. For now, you can try selecting everything but "nude painting" from the Genres list. That may help. Alternatively, maybe select an artist known to be "safer".
This might be a good use of Amazon Mechanical Turk. It will need to be manually done by humans but you can do it at a very cheap rate by crowd sourcing it.
Love the app and gladly paid the full price. Only downside for me so far is the image quality -- most look ok, but many look bad with really low resolutions, even on my non-retina MBA.
Update: All promo codes have now been given away. Thank you for the interest!
Also, MANY THANKS to those who have reported bugs! In my small test group things were working fine, but as with any manufactured good, once you have enough instances of something problems appear at so many sigma. I am investigating the bugs and working to fix them. Thank you for your support and patience. As a solo dev it really means a lot. I am also working to improve filter selection and am tidying up the UI a bit.
Agree with dingdingdang to have some caching, or some core set of wallpapers or something.
Also seems to be bugged when clicking the "Next artwork" menu item - keeps on showing the same image every other time, although the title does change to something random.
Agree with dingdingdang to have some caching, or some core set of wallpapers or something.
Also seems to be bugged when clicking the "Next artwork" menu item - keeps on showing the same image every other time, although the title does change to something random.
The repeat seems to be a OSX/Yosemite bug that some have seen, and is often fixed by a reboot. If you open the display preferences does the thumbnail change correctly?
Second, I'm seeing this bug and yes, in the Desktop & Screen Saver settings, the thumbnail is correct (you can see what it should be by opening the menu bar dropdown and clicking the title of the piece which will open it in the browser straight from s3).
Edit: tried reboot, the app tried to autostart but crashed. Started it manually, it kept crashing a few times. It is now running but still showing a particular image on every other change, even automatic.
I have submitted an update to Apple, currently pending approval. Hopefully it will be available on the App Store soon and fix the issues you're seeing.
It's interesting that no matter how much one tests, bugs invariably appear for some percentage of users, given the configuration of the software and the environment of the machine. I liken it to manufacturing defects that present at so many sigma. It's because of feedback from users like you that things get better, so thanks for taking the time to comment!
Great app! Please add the option to add the artist and title of the work to the desktop somewhere in the corner, perhaps even with a link, so that we may learn a little about the work itself also.
Edit : I see you already do this in the menubar. :)
Thanks for the feedback--added to my feature ToDos. I didn't include artist text already because I did not want to overlay anything that would get in the way of the art, but enough people have requested it that it is something I'm planning to add as an option. For now, the artist name is available in the menu bar drop down, and it opens the wikipedia page for the artist (and clicking the name of the work opens the URL to the image file). Optionally, turning on notifications will also show the artist name.
I know its random and not cheap enough with current tech, but wall hanging tablets/digital photo-frames that present an ever changing (and possibly sync'd) set of art in the same style as a museum would be seriously awesome. Needs a lot of screen estate to have title underneath. E.g. a bit like http://www.artofwildlife.com/Miniature_Paintings_Exhibition3...
If you mean where the image files come from, they're hosted at https://s3.amazonaws.com/artful-collection. Using Chrome will just give the xml structure of the bucket, but you could parse and browse yourself with that much.
no, I meant where did you take the images in the first place. I had a thought in the past of making an app that used classic art in some way, and IIRC I found that http://www.artchive.com/ lets you use their art collection for commercial purposes, while the Google Art project https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project doesn't.
I think that even if the original art has no copyright restrictions, the reproductions of it can have some.
Nope, nope, nope. Reproductions can never have their own copyright. Really: No matter how much work someone does in tracking down and scanning public domain art, the "work" in question is still in the public domain. Only authors get copyrights, not "sweat of the brow" labor.
You can get a copyright in any creative changes or additions you make to a public domain artwork--the things that you are the author of.
It is sometimes a violation of Internet norms to fail to give credit to someone who has originally scanned something, but this is not copyright.
Like the concept here. Would love a trial version, though.
Slightly off-topic, but this reminds me of what Electric Objects are trying to achieve: essentially, this same app, but hanging on your wall. The future of art consumption for the masses.
I'm on Windows though, and currently very happy about Amazing Lock Screen[0], which takes the daily photo from Bing.com and puts it on your lock screen. If anyone knows a similar app but for public domain art, I'd be very interested.
Thanks for the purchase! Better multi-monitor support is on the agenda. You can eliminate the pillarboxed art/black bars by selecting "Zoom in to art to fill screen" at some sacrifice of resolution. There's also an option to prefer landscape-orientation artwork, which is really a filter to only select art with a width:height ratio of >1.3.
Would be nice to have an option for different art pieces on different spaces as well. For example, I use 4 spaces on my primary display and 1 space on the external one and I'd be delighted if I had 5 different art pieces shown.
Out of curiosity, and by no means feel you have to share if it compromises your product, how did you source the pieces? Did you have an idea of what genres and artists you wanted already or did a somewhat comprehensive library already exist someplace and you filled in some gaps?
I think its at a higher price point for me to try. Regarding the recommendation engine I did suggest to start collecting some information about your users and their likes/dislikes with artist. Till then I believe item based recommender might do better for you. I am a data engineer, pm me for any help with rec sys.
ATB
154 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threada) I probably won't pay to evaluate it. It seems like the kind of app that would be perfect for a cut-down trial version.
b) I wonder how many people - especially this audience - really care about what's on their desktop. I know I barely ever see mine, because I run all windows maximised (or tiled). It's nice to have a good looking image for the brief period of startup/shutdown time during which I can actually see it, and I plump for the Mountain Lion-era space image because I think it's a lot more attractive than the recent mavericks/yosemite equivalents. But anything more, in my book, is overkill.
How many people care about art on their desktop? I don't know either! Seeing more art can only be a good thing. It's a discovery tool for me. I've chanced my Mission Control preferences so I can quickly show the desktop by moving my mouse cursor to the lower left hot corner of my screen.
I do. The duller, the better. Uniform gray is my preferred background (not too bright red on production systems or when logged in as administrator).
Pictures I liked had 'dull' parts in regions where icons tend to show up. An option to reduce (color) contrast would be a nice feature, especially if it were to have some smarts depending on the picture and what icons are on the desktop.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.nurik.roma...
edit: Resolved!
Landscape images resized to fit screens in portrait orientation look really bad.
If you have a mixed set of monitor orientations, would you prefer to have a different art piece on each one, suited to the respective orientation, or a piece that tries to fit both (restricting the art to near-square works)?
I'm interested in hearing about the experience others have had with the Mac app store. I've been giving away promo codes, and that seems to have helped sales by word-of-mouth. Although the app appeared on the daily "Top Paid" and "Top Grossing" chart for its category, that happened with only low double-digit purchase counts. It seems there are fewer people using Mac app store than the iOS store.
Feedback is welcome, and I still have a few free codes left if anyone would like to try it without buying. I set the price point at $5 because it covers my costs (AWS mostly), it's less than an art museum admission, and it is about the same as a Starbucks coffee (hopefully within impulse range for many).
Once for having no other option, I glued together RSS feeds + deviant arts + rotate background from a folder... It worked quite well, but some unfiltered deviant art publications were upsetting me, plus a painful maintenance...
As a random suggestion I feel like if your 'WHY' is something like to "effortlessly inspire with great art during normal computer use" rather than just focussing on an app that changes your desktop background. I like your collaborative filtering idea, and if you're taking feature requests a screensaver/multiplatform port would be nice (e.g. if every time I open my phone the lockscreen background is a different work of art its a pretty effortless way to get more exposure) ;)
I'll have to learn more about what it would take to make a screensaver. Unfortunately the iOS APIs do not seem to expose any programmatic way to change the background or lock screen (I'd love it on my phone too!).
I did something similar as a screensaver for the Mac, but it's some hack based on Webkit, it's stored locally and the range of artists is more limited.
I'd love if Apple allowed this in iOS, but I'm not holding my breath
Great job, btw
If not, might I make it a feature request?
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Perfor...
Each of the network interfaces have different identifiers and you can get info about them.
Also maybe helpful, many of the apple BSD utilities have a `-C` and `-E` options to prevent binding to a cellular or "expensive" interfaces. For example, `netcat` has this, and is open sourced (part of Darwin), so you can poke around and see how they do it.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/netcat/netcat-22/netc...
(By the way, just bought the app - happy to pay $5 for this.. Good luck!)
Did you come across any good guides for making Swift Apps in OS X?
I know it's art but everyone else just sees nudity.
http://www.patrick-wied.at/static/nudejs/
It is Javascript but it should be pretty easy to run it under node.js
[0]: http://www.macworld.com/article/2854235/the-week-in-mac-apps...
[0]: http://www.macworld.com/article/2854235/the-week-in-mac-apps...
Where are you pulling the art work from? Are you hosting the art on your own AWS account or pulling from some sort of art project guetenburg?
Just bought it and stumbled over a minor thing: UTF8 support for the artists name would be great (e.g. Albrecht Durer -> Albrecht Dürer).
Also, MANY THANKS to those who have reported bugs! In my small test group things were working fine, but as with any manufactured good, once you have enough instances of something problems appear at so many sigma. I am investigating the bugs and working to fix them. Thank you for your support and patience. As a solo dev it really means a lot. I am also working to improve filter selection and am tidying up the UI a bit.
Also seems to be bugged when clicking the "Next artwork" menu item - keeps on showing the same image every other time, although the title does change to something random.
Also seems to be bugged when clicking the "Next artwork" menu item - keeps on showing the same image every other time, although the title does change to something random.
Second, I'm seeing this bug and yes, in the Desktop & Screen Saver settings, the thumbnail is correct (you can see what it should be by opening the menu bar dropdown and clicking the title of the piece which will open it in the browser straight from s3).
Edit: tried reboot, the app tried to autostart but crashed. Started it manually, it kept crashing a few times. It is now running but still showing a particular image on every other change, even automatic.
It's interesting that no matter how much one tests, bugs invariably appear for some percentage of users, given the configuration of the software and the environment of the machine. I liken it to manufacturing defects that present at so many sigma. It's because of feedback from users like you that things get better, so thanks for taking the time to comment!
Edit : I see you already do this in the menubar. :)
I think that even if the original art has no copyright restrictions, the reproductions of it can have some.
You can get a copyright in any creative changes or additions you make to a public domain artwork--the things that you are the author of.
It is sometimes a violation of Internet norms to fail to give credit to someone who has originally scanned something, but this is not copyright.
Would love the ability to add a folder of my own images, to mix it up a bit.
Slightly off-topic, but this reminds me of what Electric Objects are trying to achieve: essentially, this same app, but hanging on your wall. The future of art consumption for the masses.
I'm on Windows though, and currently very happy about Amazing Lock Screen[0], which takes the daily photo from Bing.com and puts it on your lock screen. If anyone knows a similar app but for public domain art, I'd be very interested.
[0] http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/amazing-lock-scr...
Will you be looking into tying this in with a screensaver? It would awesome for the office if it can pull up art into a screensaver.
I'd love to see intelligent support for multiple monitors, and perhaps a nice way to avoid such black bars around the portrait-dimension pieces.
I currently use and love Momentum - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/momentum/laookkfkn...