Artful App Reviews

This is a very nice app. The Smart Art Display, which takes the art image, zooms it out to the size of your display, applies a heavy blur to it, and then places it behind the art image makes all the difference in the world. I have the rotation set to every eight hours, which usually means I get one, maybe two different pieces of art every day. Its nice to take a break, and read about the artist and the piece, which is easy to do from links in the menubar icon. Ive only had one issue with the app, and it wasnt the apps fault at all, but rather a side effect from some of Yosemites aggressive caching. Regardless, a quick email explaining the issue to the developer, and he responded quickly with a suggestion that both made sense and worked. :)

Artful brings a rich gallery of art to something I use every day: my computer. It is wonderful to sit down at my desk and see a colorful work spanning my desktop. I’ve discovered artists and styles thanks to the app, and see things I would not ordinarily see. For less than the cost of a museum admission I get to see many works of art. The name plate feature included in the most recent version is a nice addition, as it shows the artist and title without having to click the program menu. If you enjoy art or would like to learn more though immersion, Artful is a great app.

I enjoy this app for the variety of art it shows me. It’s always something new—truly like Pandora for art! The newest version has a great feature I really like; it includes the art information below the work on your desktop, so be sure to hide your dock!

Artful, for the most part, does as it says. When running your desktop is constantly updating with beautiful artwork of every kind. However, it does crash. A lot. I can’t seem to keep it running more than a day at a time. Every time I plug in a monitor, or change screens, it seems to crash. The weirdest thing is that after a recent hard drive scan in order to find what was taking up so much space, I found that Artful was not deleting its image cache, resulting in over 32 gigabytes of used hdd space. It has amazing promise but needs to address some serious bugs.

The application is absolutely gorgeous! The quality of the arts is great on my screen. However, the app does shut off by itself after a while and I cannot it back up unless I restart my computer. It would be fantastic if this problem is fixed… But otherwise, thumbs up!

I just bought this app, and the variety is amazing. Unfortunately, there is little instruction on how to use the app for the technologically-impaired. For example, the art on my desktop doesn’t fit the screen — there are gray strips on all sides, and I have no idea how to fix this. I went to system preferences and clicked “fill screen” and that did nothing. Second, I bought this mostly as a screensaver app — so that when my computer is sitting and not being used, there would be art on the screen rather than the ugly standard “Macbook Pro” logo. But I can’t find an option to set this to my screensaver. Fortunately, I contacted the developer, who answered me right away and instructed me on how to have the image fill the screen (click off the use smartart display and it will give you options for how to fill the screen.) Unfortunately, this app cannot be used for a screensaver, which is why I bought it. That’s why I deduct one star. This unavailability of the app to be used as a screensaver should be made very clear to potential purchasers. Otherwise, it’s a wonderful application which tons of art in one place.

Bravo! Get this NOW! I Wish I could give it a 6th star. The pictures colors come to life on the screen, the backlighting makes them better displayed then in some galleries. I have had it for over a year and still every 5 min get a new picture and a feeling of delight and comfort seeing the worlds best art collection without even going to, or paying for, a museum. Is its the best art and history course I could take and the best $9.99 I ever spent. Im serious, get it now!