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Show HN: A Native Art Gallery for the Mac

archagon.net

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Re: Show HN: A Native Art Gallery for the Mac

#21

Post by mcjiggerlog »

poignard wrote: post #4

I've been using an app called artpip for a while, it's great: https://www.artpip.com/

Creator of Artpip here. Came to suggest it as an alternative. Happy to answer any questions!

Also @OP - you might want to take a look at the wallpaper-macos[0] lib that I developed for Artpip. It uses the nodobj node wrapper but it should be a useful reference. You don't need to read from the sqlite DB or deal with restarting the dock. You can reliably get the current wallpaper like so [1]. Also you might want to check out how [2] it handles setting backgrounds on multiple spaces, should you want to support that.

[0] https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wallpaper-macos

[1] https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wallpaper-macos/blob/mas...

[2] https://github.com/tom-james-watson/macos-space-change

Re: Show HN: A Native Art Gallery for the Mac

#22

Post by archagon »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #21
poignard wrote: post #4

I've been using an app called artpip for a while, it's great: https://www.artpip.com/

Creator of Artpip here. Came to suggest it as an alternative. Happy to answer any questions! Also @OP - you might want to take a look at the wallpaper-macos[0] lib that I developed for Artpip. It uses the nodobj node wrapper but it should be a useful reference. You don't need to read from the sqlite DB or deal with restarting the dock. You can reliably get the current wallpaper like so [1]. Also you might want to che…

Thanks for the links! desktopImageURL works if you're manually cycling your wallpapers, but it won't give you the correct result if you're relying on the native macOS cycling functionality. (It only returns the source image directory URL.) Hence the private functions and Dock restarting.

Re: Show HN: A Native Art Gallery for the Mac

#23

Post by o_____________o »

nullicorn wrote: post #14

I see these kind of projects often, and I’m not sure how I feel about them. Art is more than just something nice to look at. By turning these pieces of art into wallpapers, it feels like the meaning, context, and significance are being stripped away. And you are missing the entire point. I could be entirely wrong as I’m no art expert.

Exposure is a big first step. Art can be explored intuitively.

Re: Show HN: A Native Art Gallery for the Mac

#24

Post by mcjiggerlog »

archagon wrote: post #10
Sidnicious wrote: post #7

Another approach is to create a window at desktop level. It can even display a web page with a system web view — you probably want to opt the window out of receiving mouse events, too, to avoid interfering with drag selection on the Desktop. I do that at home with a local HTML file to randomly generate a desktop background at startup, and I’ve tried dynamic content (like a countdown clock). Code here: https://github.…

Neat! Do you know if this works well across Spaces? I went with the wallpaper approach because I figured it was likely to be the least error-prone, especially across OS updates.

Yes, you can make the window show on all spaces.

I'd point out, however, that when I first made Artpip (https://www.artpip.com/) I rendered backgrounds using a desktop level window but the performance overhead was too high when compared to just setting the backgrounds natively, so I ended up switching over to that instead. Artpip is made with Electron though, so if you do everything natively then maybe you'll see different results.

Re: Show HN: A Native Art Gallery for the Mac

#25

Post by mcjiggerlog »

archagon wrote: post #22
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creator of Artpip here. Came to suggest it as an alternative. Happy to answer any questions! Also @OP - you might want to take a look at the wallpaper-macos[0] lib that I developed for Artpip. It uses the nodobj node wrapper but it should be a useful reference. You don't need to read from the sqlite DB or deal with restarting the dock. You can reliably get the current wallpaper like so [1]. Also you might want to che…

Thanks for the links! desktopImageURL works if you're manually cycling your wallpapers, but it won't give you the correct result if you're relying on the native macOS cycling functionality. (It only returns the source image directory URL.) Hence the private functions and Dock restarting.

Ah, ok. Why not just implement your own cycling instead of relying on the system cycling?

Re: Show HN: A Native Art Gallery for the Mac

#26

Post by archagon »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #25
archagon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the links! desktopImageURL works if you're manually cycling your wallpapers, but it won't give you the correct result if you're relying on the native macOS cycling functionality. (It only returns the source image directory URL.) Hence the private functions and Dock restarting.

Ah, ok. Why not just implement your own cycling instead of relying on the system cycling?

I suppose I envisioned the app as something that simply slotted on top of the native system behavior and wouldn't break anything when closed. Less hassles, less maintenance, and the user doesn't have to worry about automatic processes changing their system settings.

As a consequence, you can set the wallpaper for each Space to a different image or directory in System Preferences, and the app will only expose its "gallery management" features when it can match the current wallpaper with an image in its assigned Source directory.

Re: Show HN: A Native Art Gallery for the Mac

#27

Post by shadowfacts »

Sidnicious wrote: post #7

Another approach is to create a window at desktop level. It can even display a web page with a system web view — you probably want to opt the window out of receiving mouse events, too, to avoid interfering with drag selection on the Desktop. I do that at home with a local HTML file to randomly generate a desktop background at startup, and I’ve tried dynamic content (like a countdown clock). Code here: https://github.…

Similar, but targeted more at desktop widgets is Ubersicht [0]. It provides a transparent, desktop-level browser window that lets you load and display widgets that get their input from CLI commands.

[0]: http://tracesof.net/uebersicht/

Re: Show HN: A Native Art Gallery for the Mac

#28

Post by mcjiggerlog »

archagon wrote: post #9
Osmium wrote: post #8

Very nice! Request: art gallery-like legends next to the artwork, with title/artist/date (I imagine this would only work with a curated source of art, but if I ever used something like this, I'd like to learn something too).

That was one of my original goals as well, but unfortunately there aren't many (any?) sources of downloadable art tagged with metadata. Hence, just the filename in the pop-up menu.

I realised the same thing when building Artpip and built up a database of ~25000 images and ~5000 artists via wikimedia's extremely unfriendly API.

I've thought about creating an open dataset that is free to use/download (everything is in the public domain anyway). The thing is, I have around 250GB of images (all images available in 4k) and I'm put off by the cost of hosting. If I were to just serve 2K images then the set would only be around 20GB.

Any suggestions for how to serve such a big file from a website?

I could just make it available as a dat (https://datproject.org), but it's not exactly a widely used technology yet. Maybe I should just make a torrent? Ideally I would be able to update the dataset in the future.

Re: Show HN: A Native Art Gallery for the Mac

#30

Post by archagon »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #28
archagon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was one of my original goals as well, but unfortunately there aren't many (any?) sources of downloadable art tagged with metadata. Hence, just the filename in the pop-up menu.

I realised the same thing when building Artpip and built up a database of ~25000 images and ~5000 artists via wikimedia's extremely unfriendly API. I've thought about creating an open dataset that is free to use/download (everything is in the public domain anyway). The thing is, I have around 250GB of images (all images available in 4k) and I'm put off by the cost of hosting. If I were to just serve 2K images then th…

If you ever get around to doing that, it would be super great! That's some excellent cataloguing work! (And DAT would be really neat to try out — I've been reading a lot about it recently and it seems like a very exciting new technology.)
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