
Show HN: Artful for Mac - tomkinstinch
http://artfulmac.com/features
======
tomkinstinch
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).

~~~
ajaimk
Also, a "Safe for Work" mode would be great.

I know it's art but everyone else just sees nudity.

~~~
tomkinstinch
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".

~~~
ajaimk
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.

------
billyhoffman
This may get downvoted but... I really don't know what to make of these "why
itsn't this free" or "won't pay to try" comments.

It's $5. For what is essentially an infinite supply of high resolution photos
of art. $5.

Yes, I know that _you_ are special and you can replicate this with Perl + LWP
to crawl and fetch these images and a cron job to blahblahblah [snore]

Stop that. $5. Artwork. And it exists and works right now! You can buy it with
1 click and have virtually unlimited art.

I honestly cannot relate to people who would so undervalue their time. For a
_Mac_ app. Honestly I wish I could pay the OP twice.

~~~
joelrunyon
Amazed as well at how little value people place on digital goods. I've built a
few apps & while 95% of people love them, we always get someone who decides
for some reason that they want a $1 refund.

How many things out there do you blow $1 on and never think about it? Is it
worth your time to claw back that type of money?

~~~
lqdc13
With most other things, you know what you are getting. With software, you are
not sure.

For this one, specifically, I'm not sure if I want my wallpapers to change all
the time. Maybe it would have network issues. Maybe it would show ads. Maybe
it has something malicious in the code. Or maybe changing wallpapers would
sometimes make it hard for you to see the icons on your desktop.

Do you really want to pay for something with all of these uncertainties?
Besides, writing a python script that would do the same might take half an
hour, but it would be fun and you would know exactly what it's doing. This is
in contrast to making coffee, which - at least for me - is anything but.

~~~
colechristensen
I'll donate $5 to the EFF in honor of the first person to spend that half hour
to put something together on GitHub.

------
oneeyedpigeon
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.

~~~
tomkinstinch
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.

~~~
__Joker
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.

------
radley
This was done on Android for free (Muzei):

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.nurik.roma...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.nurik.roman.muzei&hl=en)

Must say, Muzei is far more in the spirit of open art than Artful. There's a
big community supporting the project with additional plugins, sources, etc.

------
autofill
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?

------
jnardiello
Pfffff don't listen to old grumpy HN. Awesome app, just bought it. I like art
and can't bother finding nice wallpapers for my desktop.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
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.

------
nicksergeant
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](https://github.com/nicksergeant/shorpypaper).

------
eunoia
This is great!

Couple minor, opinionated suggestions:

A) Can we get just a little more information about the piece without having to
click? Something like a little badge in the corner with artist, style and
year.

B) A settings window without an X is slightly disconcerting. Looking for the
red X was my first instinct when trying to back out without committing
changes.

Edit: I saw your comment about no iOS API's for setting background and lock
screen. That doesn't mean there isn't a benefit in letting the user choose
their own from your curated collection. Also look into taking advantage of
second screen devices. An app could make a gallery out of an Apple TV or
Chromecast.

Example:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.artkick.ar...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.artkick.artkick&hl=en)

------
andybak
Side question - how often do you guys see your desktop? My answer is 'almost
never'. I can't see why I ever would. If I'm using my computer then I'm
looking at an application window or several. The times I close or hide all
applications to start at my desktop is, erm, never.

~~~
archagon
OSX user. I usually have 5-10 different desktops open, each with a random
background that changes every half an hour. So whenever I go into Mission
Control or create a new desktop, I get to enjoy a new picture. Also, if I
catch a glimpse of something cool in my current background on the edge of the
screen, I'll take a quick peek via the 4-finger pinch gesture.

------
drsim
Love the concept. Purchased. But I fear the settings are going to undo a lot
of people.

Bug: on the initial state it looks like everything is included (as it should
be). However when I select Styles > Kinetic art, press 'change art now', I get
the error message 'No high resolution art found for these filters!'.

Okay, so I'll just select every 'Style' with cmd+A. Same error. Okay, maybe I
need to select every item in every filter type so I cmd+A them all. Same
error.

Now how do I return the app back to its default state of no filters set? And
how do I properly set a single filter?

It seems like checkboxes would be much better for usability. It's certainly a
challenge though as you have 100s of artists all available to filter by.

~~~
tomkinstinch
Filters can be deselected by clicking them again. If you have many selected,
pressing the keyboard letter of one of the options will narrow the selection
to only that item. After that it can be deselected or changed. I'm working on
improving deselection in an upcoming version.

~~~
drsim
Got it. Filtering by artists and genres works fine but every style I try to
filter by gives the 'no results, change filters' message.

~~~
tomkinstinch
Should be fixed in the next update, pending approval by Apple.

------
wesley
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. :)

~~~
tomkinstinch
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.

~~~
psandersen
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...](http://www.artofwildlife.com/Miniature_Paintings_Exhibition3.jpg)

~~~
tomkinstinch
I also do embedded systems, so that's something to think about. :)

~~~
stashpro
hum.. imagine if you develop apps for the Apple tv.. that would be seriously
awesome.

------
magic5227
FYI one source for free HQ downloads:
[https://images.nga.gov/en/search/do_quick_search.html?q=mone...](https://images.nga.gov/en/search/do_quick_search.html?q=monet)

~~~
magic5227
Some of my favorites: [http://imgur.com/a/d3brY](http://imgur.com/a/d3brY)

------
samselikoff
Would buy but I'm still on Mavericks :(

------
mindsuck
Have you thought about adding other public domain images that are not
necessarily related to art? I'd love something like this that pulls from
NASA's image galleries instead.

~~~
tomkinstinch
That's a great idea. A sister app perhaps?

------
dingdingdang
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!

~~~
tomkinstinch
How much art would you be comfortable caching locally? The full collection is
over 30GB.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
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.

------
skrebbel
Looks nice!

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...](http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/amazing-lock-
screen/7e1f890f-8960-43e5-a258-58ba3eeb1163)

------
ultimoo
Great app! On a related note -- do people really get to see their desktop
wallpaper often on OS X? I occasionally go hunting online for a cool wallpaper
but then realize that I don't look at it for weeks. The only time I look at it
is when I restart my computer (which is once every 3-4 weeks). All other
times, I have my browsers, terminals, and other applications taking up more
than 90% of the screen and I see no reason to minimize them.

~~~
gurkendoktor
My windows always fill the screen entirely, but I often use the trackpad
gesture to reveal the desktop. It's where my downloads go, where I do all my
drag-and-dropping, where I sort files into folder aliases that go somewhere on
my file system.

But then I've bought a 21:9 display and my collection of National Geographics
HD wallpapers stopped looking good (I assume Artful would be the same) - now I
just stare at Apple's Aqua Blue background from 10.4 again.

------
gghh
cool. Out of curiosity, where do you get the art from?

~~~
jtanderson
If you mean where the image files come from, they're hosted at
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/artful-collection](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.

~~~
gghh
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/](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](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.

~~~
jxdxbx
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.

------
revorad
Nice. Have you considered making a version for the browser to show art in the
new tab? I never see my desktop but do see new tabs all day long.

I currently use and love Momentum -
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/momentum/laookkfkn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/momentum/laookkfknpbbblfpciffpaejjkokdgca)

------
joeguilmette
Great idea for an app, however: it doesn't work

-Click 'Next artwork' cycles through 2-3 of the same painting

-Selecting every single 'Technique' throws a 'No high resolution artwork found in those filters'.

For a $5 app this is not good. I've contacted Apple Support for a refund.
Sorry to be harsh, but shame on you for selling software that was clearly not
tested.

~~~
tomkinstinch
\- This appears to be a OSX/Yosemite bug. If you examine the thumbnail in
display preferences, the artwork _is_ changed by artful, but the OS fails to
update for a few people, for some reason. Reports are that a reboot fixes it.

-I just tested it and selecting all techniques does work. Perhaps you had other filters selected that narrowed the return set too much? Try making your filter selections more broad.

What is your specific configuration?

~~~
joeguilmette
Rebooting does not solve the problem. Artwork doesn't change every hour. I can
get it to choose new Artwork sometimes by killing and restarting the App.

"This appears to be a OSX/Yosemite bug"... I have to wonder. If you didn't
test your OSX app on the latest version of OSX... Did you even test it at all?

~~~
tomkinstinch
I'm sorry you have been having problems. It was developed on Yosemite, and I
did test. Unfortunately the bug was difficult for me to reproduce until just
recently. This is a bug only some have been seeing related to how the OS
caches images. I have submitted a fix, and the update is currently waiting for
approval by Apple. Hopefully it will be available on the App Store soon.

------
javajosh
I really liked the idea, and installed it; happy to pay the price of a latte
for it. But...it crashes! The menu bar icon goes away. Also, Little Snitch is
reporting that it wants to phone home on every art change, which I'm not happy
with. I'm also not happy that it wants to connect to
pimage.timespeople.nytimes.com for some reason.

~~~
tomkinstinch
The art is stored online, hence the http requests to fetch new art...

And it is certainly not connecting to any nytimes url. All art is stored on
S3, and the only server it talks to should be artfulmac.com Maybe your
computer is compromised?

------
adultSwim
Cool app.

Where did the photos come from? Who owns them? The art is public domain but
the photos themselves may be copyrighted.

I would buy it after learning this.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's an interesting question. Generally speaking (if one can really do that in
legal areas) if the photograph features another work but is not transformative
(loosely: doesn't add any new artistic content) then the photo doesn't have a
separate copyright [or at least not one that's useful for anything].

In short, slavish reproduction is copying, not creation of original works.

Exceptions have been made under "sweat of the brow" arguments when museums,
for example, make extremely high quality reproductions (or UV images or
similar where there is a lot of technical effort involved). I don't really buy
the argument, but it doesn't stand here as we're talking relatively low grade
copies for small screens.

* For the USA case: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernard-starr/museum-paintings...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernard-starr/museum-paintings-copyright_b_1867076.html)

* This museums copyright group tries to down-play Bridgeman somewhat, [http://museumscopyright.org.uk/resources/articles/bridgeman/](http://museumscopyright.org.uk/resources/articles/bridgeman/).

* A UK article circa 1996, [http://www.artquest.org.uk/articles/view/photographing-artwo...](http://www.artquest.org.uk/articles/view/photographing-artwork1).

~~~
adultSwim
Thank you

------
vishalzone2002
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

------
barumrho
I wanted something like this. It would be great if it could work as a screen
saver too. I rarely see my desktop.

------
richthegeek
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.

~~~
tomkinstinch
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?

~~~
jtanderson
Firstly, nice job!

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.

~~~
tomkinstinch
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!

------
mdevere
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.

~~~
mdevere
So, just purchased this. Very nice. Would like an option to change the art
once every 12 or 24 hours, if possible?

~~~
tomkinstinch
Changing the update frequency options is planned for a future update.

------
jfmercer
Great app, great work. I like anything that can automate beauty into my
workspace.

------
flycaliguy
My 2 cents would be:

Insure that the art is not being resized out of it's original proportions.
Just like how nobody want's to see a pan and scan movie anymore, make sure you
aren't robbing the art of it's compositional power by changing it's
dimensions.

Also as a visual artist myself, I have actually noticed in the past that
having a piece of art as my wallpaper has helped me build a better
understanding of a master's work through repeated exposure. I'm just brain
storming here, but it would be cool if say over the course of a month I was
shown 4 or 5 different pieces (I prefer a long exposure in order to allow my
interpretation time to evolve and grow) and each of these pieces were related
somehow. It could become a bit of a puzzle to figure out what the last work
had in common with this weeks.

~~~
tomkinstinch
Artful does not change the aspect ratio. As for whether or not the edges are
truncated, that is an option left to the user--each piece can be displayed in
full, letterboxed or pillarboxed (with bars of arbitrary color), or it can be
cropped to fill the screen.

------
Glide
I'm going to try it now. Who cares if it's 5 bucks if I get some value out of
it.

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.

------
gouthamvel
Great app. Thank you.

Can we get a feature to favourite an artwork. And playback only favourites
later. Found a bug, sometime the artwork doesn't change, but a notification
pops up. Could actually be a network delay!

~~~
tomkinstinch
Collaborative filtering is planned. :)

First is nailing down subtle bugs that are appearing for a minority of people.

------
archagon
OH SNAP! I've been looking for a way to do this for years, for the same
reasons as you, but have never had much luck in actually finding high
resolution art. What are your sources?

------
JohnnyDouglas
This made my day. Happy to pay 5 bones for it.

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.

~~~
tomkinstinch
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.

~~~
nes350
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.

------
johtso
Nice app, would be great if it worked better with multiple monitors in
different orientations though!

Landscape images resized to fit screens in portrait orientation look really
bad.

~~~
tomkinstinch
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)?

~~~
cfeduke
Different pictures on each monitor should be the default. The premise is you
want to expose users to more art!

~~~
tomkinstinch
Fair enough! I'll have to think about how that would change the interaction
with the main menu.

------
kefs
Off-topic, but the site gets all wonky when trying to zoom in/out/reset with
ff34.. looks like it's the backstretch jquery plugin causing it.

------
hew
Very neat idea! It's reliably crashing for me every time ~30 seconds after
opening on 10.10.1.

Not too sure where to start troubleshooting. Any ideas?

~~~
tomkinstinch
Are you running the app from within the Applications directory? This is a new
issue. If you open up the debug Console (Applications->Utilities->Console) and
search for Artful, what comes up? (Please email me.)

~~~
hew
Yep, I am. I'll do that.

------
stashpro
I've long been a fan of having artwork as my wallpaper, and finding nice ones
has always been a hassle. Just bought it. Thanks!

------
sondh
I'm using this app Kuvva and it works pretty well. What is the difference from
yours? Your app does look much better though.

~~~
tomkinstinch
I'm not super familiar with Kuvva, but looking at it the difference appears to
be that Kuvva displays modern illustration (of unknown copyright?), while
Artful displays 68,000 classic works of fine art.

~~~
m-app
Kuvva indeed showcases contemporary art by featured artists changing every
week. I've been a happy user for years and would definitely recommend checking
it out.

------
simonnreynolds
Sounds similar to
[http://www.electricobjects.com/](http://www.electricobjects.com/)

------
aqme28
I get "The item you've requested is not currently available in the U.S.
store." when I try to buy it.

edit: Resolved!

------
motdiem
Nice app - saves the hassle looking for hi-res art.

Would love the ability to add a folder of my own images, to mix it up a bit.

~~~
tomkinstinch
A local folder in the mix would be an interesting addition. I've included it
in the development ToDos/wishlist.

------
cmpaul
I know it's art, but I'm having trouble explaining "Torso of Venus" to my
coworkers... :)

------
photograve
Congratulations, nice app. Just the UX's from the 90's ;)

~~~
tomkinstinch
Any suggestion on how to improve filtering for 68,000 items beyond an
NSTableView?

~~~
billyhoffman
Its not about NSTableView. It's things like:

\- Gray boxes around some controls, not around others

\- Control layout. What's up with that sea of nothingness in the top right?

\- No titles/labels for each odd grouping of controls

\- I'm seeing horizontal scroll bars something in the tables, but the text
isn't wide enough to need a scroll bar (Yosemite)

\- OK button just kind of sitting in the middle?

\- No cancel/revert function

\- No standard window "close" button, just minimize or that weird "OK"

This is just a bad setting screen layout with really unpolished design. It
looks like controls were just dragging and dropped in interface builder. I
would suggest that you go and look at the settings dialogs other Mac apps like
Mail, etc.

------
nichochar
Is it legal to make people pay for public domain art?

~~~
jdhawk
You're not paying for the art, you're paying for the convenience.

You can go download all those images, and put them in a folder and have OSX
rotate on the folder randomly.

~~~
tomkinstinch
Indeed! Having the art in a directory that the OS drew from was the prototype
for Artful! :) I wanted the ability to filter things though, thus Artful was
born.

