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).
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.
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
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.
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() ).
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.
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).
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...
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).