Artful for Mac: Desktop art that matches your taste
Artful (U.S. $4.99) is a well thought out app that lets you have any of thousands of public domain artworks as your desktop based on parameters you select.
The app works as a menu item, and you pull it down to get a nice control panel letting you very precisely select the type of art you want displayed. You can choose the style of the art, the medium, the kind of canvas, and you can choose from one or hundreds of specific artists, or anything in between.
The art itself is online, so it can take a moment to download. The app lets you pick the frequency of updates, so if you want you can have a new desktop picture every minute up to one new image every 120 hours. All the images are of good quality, and I was displaying them just fine on my 30 inch Cinema Display.
Another nice feature is the ability to dim the artwork, as some bright art could easily make things on your desktop hard to see. When you use the dimmer it appears on the next art displayed, not the current one.
I think one of the nicest aspects to this app is the ability to discover some artists and works that you are not familiar with. In my case, almost every image was new to me.
I didn't see any bugs running the program, and it's a clever idea for an app that will give you a constantly changing desktop and some new insights into artists you might like.
Artful requires OS X 10.10 or later and a 64-bit processor.
