App Review: Lookatart Is One of Windows Phone’s Slickest Apps Yet

Have you ever wanted the museum experience of viewing classical art…in the palm of your hand? Well if you didn’t before, Lookatart might change that.

Developed by Victor Kiselev, the app was actually released back in October of last year (around the time of launch) and somehow in between those 10,000 or so apps it got overlooked. Well I’m here to make up for that, starting with this: Lookatart is one of Windows Phone’s best looking apps so far.

When you first start the app, a wall of small thumbnail-sized pictures fade into view and are organized into rows (seen above). Then there are a few different ways you can zoom into this ‘wall’: pinch-to-zoom, tapping on one of the thumbnails, or pressing the dedicated + or – buttons. Whichever way you do zoom in, the app shows off its beautiful performance by swiftly and smoothly affixing on the picture you selected.

Upon zooming in you’re treated to a picture and over a few seconds it will adjust its focus and clear up the details. One of the coolest features of the app is just how high the resolution of most of these images are—according to the developer, “up to 160 megapixels each” and totaling 2 gigabytes. What’s more impressive is how good of a job the app does at loading up these larger files in a very fluid and cohesive way—there’s no choppiness from zooming and no lag while panning around within the picture. The app’s touch responsiveness is more ‘airy’ than the ultra-fast reactivity found in native apps like the Pictures Hub, but it’s still stupidly smooth and it seems like the effect was intentional.


There’s also a couple of really thoughtful features Lookatart provides. The most genuinely useful of which is by far the awesome snapshot feature. The app basically allows you to take a screenshot within any area of the app and it will save whatever you’re looking at in the Pictures Hub. So if you find a great looking Van Dongen work like Woman in a Black Hat you can zoom in to your desired crop of it, take a snapshot, and use it as a wallpaper. Another nifty feature is the slideshow option which automatically scrolls to the picture on the right after a few seconds and you can quit out of it by simply tapping anywhere. Also, when you’re viewing a single painting, in the top left corner a little blue ‘i’ button pops up; tapping on it opens a page with the picture’s details, including the artist and the name of the work. Then there’s the randomize option and it does exactly that—in a snazzy, mixing-a-pile-of-cards-together animation too. Finally there’s the filter option found in the appbar below which lets you search the app via artist in case you’re looking for anyone in particular.

There’s only two real issues that I could see working against Lookatart. The first is the fact that you have to be connected to the internet while using the app; otherwise it doesn’t even load throwing back an odd ‘null’ server error. This was pretty confusing to me at first until I realized my Wi-Fi was off, so fair warning. But I suppose the required internet connection makes sense because the app obviously couldn’t be less than 1MB if it had 116 images of 160 megapixels each loaded inside it. The other issue that the selection of art, while excellent, is pretty limited. Like I said, there are about 116 works included in the app and there is no option to download more images or load your own. However, in the About page of the app, Kiselev stated he plans to publish 1000 more images in the future, so this may be a moot point.

But the sheer quality and design work found in Lookatart transcends those small annoyances and the low price of $0.99 certainly helps. What’s more, it appears as though the included free trial is a free version of the app and there aren’t even any ads to be found, so this is strictly donation-based as of right now but for only $0.99 you might as well help the guy out. Especially considering the fact that he has made one of the most innovative, slickest apps for Windows Phone 7 thus far and shows the true potential of future apps to come.

Note: If you’d like a preview of his efforts on your PC, check out his Lookatart website for a Silverlight based application that functions in a pretty similar way as the app. The site is in Russian, but you don’t need to know it if all you’re planning to do is check out the images!

Highly Recommended!

Lookatart
Victor Kiselev
$0.99 + Free Trial
Version 1.8.0.0