Artful App Reviews

there is always a “but” :-) I wish I could mark pictures as favourites and get them permanently saved instead of just having the picture currently shown somewhere hidden on my disk. additionally a tool / link to get more information about the picture would be nice, just like “Artkick” is doing it on the iphone. But apart from that: great, thanks a lot!

This app is a super fun way to display art and learn more about it. The update with the blurry background is really nice. Displaying the name of the painter and title of the painting somewhere in that blurry part who make it even better.

I’ve grown to be a big fan of Artful. Educational, elegant and entertaining. It’s an art gallery in my home! This is a thoughtful App. You’ll learn about art history, painters and styles in this well designed application. The developers are committed to upgrfading their product. Highly recommended.

does not change background color as it suppose to be. do not buy it until it is critical-bug-free.

I really love this app and the idea behind it. Not only is it pretty, but also great for discovering amazing art works. I only wish there was one more functionality: possibility to mark a picture as favourite and see the list of favourites within the app or a possibility to download a picture to hard drive.

You’re great, thank you for fixed bug!

I love the new SmartArt layout. Thanks!

1. I hate that it’s a menu bar item. I have enough crap in my menu bar. My menu bar is not a junk drawer for apps that think they’re too special for a dock icon. To me, it’s inexcusable to not even give the user an option to remove the app from the menu bar. 2. Some of the artwork seems low-resolution. Even when checking “prefer hi-res” and “prefer landscape”, it gives me artwork that doesn’t fill the display and has black borders on either size. Choosing the “zoom-in” option removes the black bars, but tends to made the artwork look blurry on my large external monitor. 3. I expected more polish from a $4.99 app that is essentially a wallpaper slideshow of public domain images. It didn’t feel like a lot of work was put into the UI. (For example, it was hard to figure out how to mass select items in the lists, I tried holding down “shift” to select several items at once which didn’t work.)

Title says it all. Does one job and does it fairly well (see below). It has some really fanstaic and fine-grained filters if you know what you like. Doesn’t seem to use too many resources, but if you care about data usage you may want to reduce the change interval and/or tell it to not prefer only HD images. As for the bugs, it gets “stuck” -- alternating between pieces, even tried rebooting, re-installing. Also much crashing. Would highly recommend, pending a lot of general bug fixes.

This is a great idea for an app and I think it’s well-executed. I took off one star because it’s boring to have the same art on all my monitors; better multi-monitor support would make it a 5-star app for me. Thanks for this app — a great way to insert some more art in my day!

This app is pretty lightweight, fast, and with well thought out options. The most glaring problem though is that the very large majority of images are overly compressed low resolution .jpgs which do absolutely no justice to the works they represent. I’m using a non-retina 27” iMac and nine out of ten images look downright terrible on it. I hate to say it, but it’s a huge problem for an app that is displaying artwork. There is a preferrence to us only high-resolution artwork.. and I have that checked on. Also, support for different pieces of art on each monitor in dual-monitor setups would be great to have as well. I look forward to the future of this app. It’s a concept i’m fond of.

It’s a cool idea, but with multiple monitors and multiple spaces, I’d like the option to have different artwork on each one. Also, the artwork is surprisingly low resolution even with the “prefer high resolution” box checked. I still like it a lot and I’m looking forward to improvement!

I like the idea of this app. Fixing these issues would help a lot: - Filters do not support shift-click to select groups. This means I have to click every single item in a list manually! - Similar to above, make it easier to have no filters (select all artwork available) - After opening Settings for the first time I was getting “Filters are too restrictive” error, even though I didn’t change anything! - Add “Cancel” button or some way to undo current settings changes - Add option to hide menu bar button

My screen background is all black. I can’t get any images to appear, although the app tells my notifcation center there is new art appearing.. I messaged the company twice and no response. Happy to change this if i could get some suppport from their website or some customer support.

This app is simply wonderful. It may be simply, but it brings alot of joy seeing a great work of art on your desktop that you weren’t expecting. I find my self checking my desktop randomly just to see what’s there. There were some bugs in the first version but I haven’t noticed any since the update. I highly recommend this for anyone wishing to mix up there desktop and replace it with some nice art.

Have been using this app for a few weeks and love it. More than a wallpaper changer, it’s an art discovery tool. Would love to see a feature added that allows me to favorite certain artworks (so that I see them more often) as well as remove certain artworks that pop up that I don’t care for from being shown again.

This app is great. It has several of my favorite artists, and displays a nice if somewhat limited variety of their work. It lets me scale down the work to display it in its entirety rather than filling my screen. If you know about art, or would like to learn, this is an excellent app!

I absolutely love the idea of this app. I really enjoy going to art museums, and this app basically lets me do that at work. :) But there are definitely some tweaks that could/should/need to be made. 1) First and foremost: higher resolutions pleaseeeeee!!!!! I use a rather large 4k monitor as my main display at work and most of the pieces, frankly, look like garbage. They’re pixelated and blotchy and bleh. I understand that there probably aren’t very many Monet’s in a 4k resolution, but I wanted to say it anyway. :) 2) I love learning about art and artists. The fact that you link to the artist’s Wikipedia page is beautiful! But I wish there was some sort of “favorites” functionality. 3) There’s probably something else I could say about sizing and cropping and getting the different pieces to fit my screens perfectly, but I know most of that is beyond your control. Thanks for making an awesome app. It’s a great educational distraction and I’ve reccommended it to all my friends.

It’s really nice seeing something new and interesting on my desktop every hour/day, especially with Yosemite’s translucency effects. It’s simple, but effective, and worth the price. The settings interface could use polishing. Right now, it’s a little jumbled, awkward to use. Hopefully, it will improve in future updates. Higher resolution art would also be great. Sometimes the art is really sharp, sometimes it’s not. Kind of a mixed bag (even with the high-resolution art preference checked).

I love this app. Really well done. Makes an astounding addition to my desktop. And tech support is instantaneous.