Web buzz: Art Alert app

Some people travel according to their stomachs. Others according to museums. The Art Alert app gives you directions to nearby museums as well as an introduction to their artwork.

Name: Art Alert

Available for: iPhone, iPad

What it does: Gives you directions, practical information and photos of representative works of art for more than 500 art museums around the globe. Art Alert is the companion app to the award-winning Art Authority app, a comprehensive and educational art app that houses nearly 60,000 works of art.

Cost: $2.99 for an introductory period.

What’s hot: You can type in a city such as Sydney, Australia, or Tokyo or Santa Barbara and start perusing works from their museums’ collections. That’s a great help for people who have time to visit only one museum but have a handful to choose from.

What’s not: There wasn’t a decent starting point or home page to return to once you were inside the app. You had two choices: search by map or by an alphabetical list of museums. I would love to have searched by periods or styles of art.

Worth it: Art Alert didn’t wow me as much as Art Authority did. I can get museum directions from Google Maps and info from Wikipedia easily enough. Some of the larger art museums, such as the Louvre in Paris, National Gallery in London and the Getty in Los Angeles have their own apps that are more in-depth.