Merdroid

Art Academy aims to be a reference app for modern or classic art & culture lovers. This virtual gallery / virtual museum lets its users learn more about their favorite paintings and artists / painters (many of the all-time greatest masters) and share their findings with friends.

Additionally, using this art gallery / art guide they can also browse the painting collections of many important museums all over the world and locate them on a map. Currently we have more than 2500 paintings on display.

Main features as of version 1.5:

• Tabbed layout to improve usability.
• Browse through paintings / art works with just the swipe of a finger.
• Share links to images with your friends via Email, SMS, Facebook or Twitter.
• Save images to the SD card, if available.
• Set displayed images as art wallpapers / art backgrounds on your home screen, also includes periodic wallpaper updating.
• Get higher resolution pictures and zoom in/out.
• Search for paintings / art pics. You can search by title, painter, media (eg.: Oil, Canvas…), period (e.g. Impressionism) or art genre (e.g.: Self-Portrait).
• Painting / Artwork bookmarks.
• Painting / Artwork slideshow.
• Open a Wikipedia article on the painter in the browser and share the Wikipedia article link (if available) with your friends via email, SMS, Facebook or Twitter.
• Search for painters. You can search by name, period (e.g.: Surrealism) and nationality (e.g.: American).
• Painter index, browse through an alphabetically ordered list of painters.
• Museum index, browse through an alphabetically ordered list of museums.
• Open a Wikipedia article on the museum in the browser and share the Wikipedia article link (if available) with your friends via email, SMS, Facebook or Twitter.
• Open the museum official site home page (if available) in the browser.
• Display both your current location and the location of the museum on a map. If you click on the museum marker, the complete address is displayed.
• Search for museums. You can search by name, museum type (e.g.: Art Gallery) and country (e.g.: United Kingdom).
• Landscape orientation supported both in the slideshow and zoom modes.

Feel free to suggest additional features you may find useful for improving this android app.

Merdroid Development Team

Some days ago we published a new version of Art Academy (release 1.5) including a feature that was requested by some of our users: a wallpaper update scheduler.

If you want to schedule a periodic wallpaper update using the painting images provided by Art Academy you just need to follow the following steps:

• Start Art Academy Android App
• Click on the MENU key
• Click on Settings, so the preferences screen is display
• Set how often you want the update to take place (refresh interval) and which the source of painting images should be (any painting, paintings you have bookmarked or paintings by the painters you have bookmarked.)

Hope you all like this new feature.

Cheers,

Merdroid Development Team

Just one week after the launch of our app on the Android Market, we have released a new version including new functionality (revision 1.4). There were some updates during the week, but minor, nothing significant concerning the functionality.

Some users told us that, in many cases, they were not able to remember the names of some of the painters they like, and therefore, it was not that easy for them to have access to the information. They suggested that we should include an index, so they could easily browse through all the available painters. And that is what we did. Now, both in the painters and museums sections, there is a button that, when clicked, displays the corresponding listing. As you can see in the pictures below the entries are grouped alphabetically and you can see the number of entries in each group on the right size.

In addition to these, some other improvements, also suggested by our users, have been made:

• Landscape orientation is now supported both in the slideshow and zoom modes
• The search results are not closed once the user has clicked on one of them. It is possible to go back to them pressing the back key. Same for the bookmarks.
• When searching by name, if the user clicks on one of the suggestions it is immediately displayed. No need to click on the search button in that case.

Thanks for the feedback. Your comments have been very useful. Hope you like the app a bit better now.

We are currently in some other interesting features and improving the content we are providing. You will hear news from us soon.

Cheers,

Merdroid Development Team

Art Academy has just been released!

Art Academy on the Android Market
Download Art Academy for Android

Mervia was founded back in 2008 as a company aiming to deliver quality Internet services to its customers. So far, we have specialized in providing consultancy services, but some time ago we decided to explore new business areas and began getting into the Android market. The outcome of this was the creation of a small team designing and developing Android apps: Merdroid.

We chose Android because it is just…. cool! Android has completely changed the way the user interacts with mobile devices and the way they access content on them. Information is no longer delivered on a tiny browser window as Android gives us the chance to display it in more suitable ways.

Today we are happy to announce that we have released our first Android app: Art Academy. For our first Android project we wanted to come up with something pretty and didactic, so we went for an art reference app. We hope that art lovers all over the world will enjoy it .

We have included below some screenshots of this new app.

If you are interested in knowing more about the app, please have a look at the Art Academy page on the “Applications”. We look forward to getting your feedback and suggestions once you have tried the app.

Enjoy your day!

Merdroid Development Team