Show HN: Art Diario – Curated art on your desktop every day | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Art Diario – Curated art on your desktop every day

artdiario.com

18 pointshisnameisjimmy12 comments

Hey HN!

I made a little app that changes your desktop background to a new piece of curated art every day. Everyone sees the same art so you can talk to your friends about it!

I learned to code a couple years ago from a bootcamp to fulfill a lifelong desire to be able to create end-to-end applications. I've been a designer, I've been a PM, but I really wanted to be able to build the things in my head. This is my first attempt to build something entirely from scratch!

This seemed so simple at first. All it does is change your background! But I wanted a fancy little admin panel that allowed me and my wife to upload new art. I wanted to be able to make the crop that ends up on your desktop really straightforward. I wanted it to be cheap to host, so hella caching. Also, omg, timezones! Marketing images and websites!

There were so many pieces to this, it is honestly astonishing how much work indie makers put into their solopreneur apps. All mine does is change your background. The people who produce more complicated stuff are really impressive.

I'm excited and nervous to share this with you all! Thank you for taking a look!

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This looks really nice, reminds me of Muzei[1] on Android which also allowed to add effects on the image that was being displayed. Definitely keeping ArtDiario running! Just a little thing: consider making the icon for the menu bar smaller, it's way to big compared to the usual size of the icons on macOS and it makes it look off [2].

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.nurik.roma... [2]: https://ibb.co/3YjkNqh

Muzei looks nice! Icon is a bit larger, was trying to get a good balance considering the letters are different sizes, but may adjust! Thanks for the feedback and for downloading!

I detail the journey to building this a bit more here if you're interested: https://www.jimmyhooker.com/blog/art-diario-the-most-complic...

For those who run Windows, I realize bing is a joke to most HN readers, but the desktop backgrounds they serve up are actually pretty great[0]. It's the only reason I keep the bing app installed on my machine.

[0]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/bing-wallpaper

I’m currently going through the process of getting a code signing certificate for windows, I’ll let you know when I have a working build.

I've got a build working on Windows, would love to have you give it a try. Hit me up at jimmy@artdiario.com

I've been using https://www.artpip.com/ for years and was annoyed when they added paid features but I'd love something different. Are you planning a Windows version at all?

I loved Artpip too, and this was directly inspired by it.

This is an Electron app, so in theory it should be relatively straight forward. I have to figure out signing and doing some testing, but that shouldn't be too bad. Biggest issue is that I don't have a Windows machine!

I've got a build working on Windows, would love to have you give it a try. Hit me up at jimmy@artdiario.com

Love it, only I would really like to see an option to hide the "Art" icon in the top bar, mine is already pretty cluttered as is.

Hmm, how would you see detail on the art of the day?

Maybe by opening the app itself, a window would show up with the detail? But I understand that would be quite a lot of rewriting.

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