There are many tools out there for OSX users to customize their look-and-feel. Many come bundled with the OS, such as screen savers or varying desktop pictures. Usually it is also pretty easy to customize the settings using either shipping items from apple, or stuff downloaded from the web.
“Expert” users can also make their own, using tools and technologies such as the quartz composer, other hacks of existing osx technologies, such as having widgets run on the desktop or having screen savers or DVDs run instead of a desktop image. There are countless how-tos available via google.
A whole other universe of possibilities can be opened with extra tools, free- or shareware applications that give you an extra edge towards the live-data-display on your desktop. There are definitely many more applications out there than I will show in this post, so feel free to comment if you know of any more.
I have three main tools running on my desktop:
- Photostickies
- Geektool
- and just (re)discovered: EarthDesk
The first and main tool to get live data from the web onto my desktop is Photostickies, a small and probably lesser known app from DevonTechnologies. makers of DevonThinkPro and DevnAgent (which is part of the current themacpak). It runs as a menu bar widget and allows you to fetch images from your hard disk or the web to your screen. The images can have different refresh times, so you can always stay up-to-date with web-cams, data plots or whatever you like.
My personal setup consists of
- some pictures of my girlfriend, changing every some minutes
- a weather extremes map of germany (back from the days of storms and frost)
- the current traffic conditions in the area (see my recent post “Staumeldungen, richtig gemacht“), published on the web as a GIF
- the current pollen levels in my area, published on the web as a PDF
The second tool that is running is Geektool. I am by far not utilizing all capabilities of it, so there are many more options available. What Geektool basically does is run shell scripts periodically and push their output to the desktop. So in the lower right part of the screenshot above you see the output of a regular svn checkout of TextMate bundles. Another script (in this case an AppleScript) tells me the title and artist of the current iTunes song.
Others have been using Geektool e.g. to display web server statistics, log files (console.log or system.log), ruby scripts — anything that can run from the command line. Just be imaginative or use google.
And, completing the screenshot above. All these little images and snippets are set upon a map of europe with current cloud coverage and lighting — produced by EarthDesk.
What do you do with your desktop?
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