ADS iPhone applications

Official press released published on prMac – http://prmac.com/member/view-release-9119.htm

ADS Software Group releases ART 4.4 for iPhone and iPod touch

Summary:

New York based ADS Software Group Inc. today announces ART 4.4, an update to their very popular and critically acclaimed pocket art gallery, slideshow and quiz for iPhone and iPod touch. Developed specifically to take advantage of the iPhone’s unique capabilities and interface, ART is a database of over 6000 masterpieces featuring 204 famous artists with full biographies. Art students, beginners and hobbyists alike can browse online galleries of works and save images to their gallery, and more.

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We have finally released and got approved ART 4.4. version. It took us 2 months to make it. We hope you will like it. There were 2 major problems in 4.3 which we addressed in 4.4:
1. Some users had regular crashes on launch
2. We removed modern artists.

In 4.4 we have isolated the feature that made it crash on start to solve the problem #1.
To solve #2, we added 35 modern artists, including: Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Mark Rothko, Joan Miro, Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keefe, Marc Chagall, Diego Rivera, Edward Hopper, Ernst Kirchner, Paul Klee, Roul Dufy, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Edouard Vuillard, Edvard Munch, Arshile Gorky, Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Andrew Wyeth, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Fernando Botero.

As we are not allowed to use images of modern paintings without licensing and paying great sum of money in advance for every single image, we have not included images in the application. Instead we added links to online galleries and created a built-in web browser that will let you not only see pictures, but also save them for your personal use at any time. Now you can create your own galleries with even higher quality images and extend your galleries indefinitely!

To celebrate the approval, we give away 5 promo codes:
4F7AT3T9HY7T
WF3LNJR47XYK
4HEFYX6NFA6F
M34Y4PR96T4L
Y4336LYW7A6Y

to use them go to http://itunes.com/redeem (US appstore only)

We submitted new version of Art to Apple a week ago.

Changes in the update:

* Added modern artists: Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Mark Rothko, Joan Miro, Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keefe, Marc Chagall, Diego Rivera, Edward Hopper, Ernst Kirchner, Paul Klee, Roul Dufy, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Edouard Vuillard, Edvard Munch, Arshile Gorky, Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Andrew Wyeth, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Fernando Botero

* Total number of artists in the database – 204

* Updated user interface

* Fixed crash on start bug. It asks you if you want to resume viewing last opened picture.

* Open wikipedia and other websites with additional information about artists in a built-in browser

* Save images from external websites to your galleries – now you can add unlimited number of paintings to your favorite artists, all you need is to find and open the images in our built-in browser and tap “Save”.

* Openfeint integration: global and local history of quiz scores with leaderboards. Achievements allow you track your progress in learning art. Challenges allow you play with other people, find new friends. Chat room for art fans. Post your achievements on facebook and twitter.

* Added missing biographies for all artists

* Extended parental control – option to see adult pictures only

* minor bug fixes

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Michelle Schusterman published a review on Art application on The iPhone App Review site .

“Rarely are apps both smart and beautiful, not to mention useful. But Art, an app as simple and classy as its name, has all of these qualities and more.”

read the full article

Thank you, Michelle!

We have made a big leap in our 4.0 version of Art by extending the image library from 400 to 5000. That was not an easy transition. Many users experienced discomfort about our new design and most of all about the need to download images or view them only when you are online.

We reacted promptly and came out with new design and ability to download all images in bulk. We also added German, French and Spanish languages and almost done with Russian. We have also greatly improved our Quiz game so that it looks more like a game with animation, timing and scores.

Unfortunately Art is consuming a lot of memory and that causes the app to crash sporadically. We are working on that issue and will make it stable with our next updates.

Planned for this week’s update (4.3): stability (crash) fix, Russian localization, minor interface fixes.
For upcoming update on the next week (4.4) we plan to add 30 more artists and slideshow feature.