For those of you who spend hours at your computer (who reading this blog doesn’t?), you probably remember the time you thought your desktop looked awesome. Maybe you found a cool wallpaper or a neat icon. But it’s time to take it to the next level. NerdTool is a nice little enhancement for Mac users who want to move past a static desktop. Sure, we know VLC can play a video as your desktop background… You might even know about GeekTool, which is kind of the grandfather of NerdTool. Cool thing about this one is that it has a pretty good following. You can display the results of a shell script on your desktop, and refresh by the second. Check out the Github wiki tips and tricks, or if you’re one of those guys who knows terminal better than correct English grammar, jump in and experiment. Also, all of the GeekTool scripts will naturally work, so digging through forums will provide for pretty easy copy-and-paste scripting to get cool results like these:
(Check out the cool iTunes progress bar on the one above)
Thanks to this blog post full of awesome scripts for Geektool and a quick Flickr search for the first several of those shots, and my friend @JamBoud for the last one.
There’s a ton of these little applications floating around to change up your desktop. Check out Bowtie for iTunes, TinkerTool for a bunch of cool hidden preference tweaking for things like shifting your dock around from it’s normal centered position.
This doesn’t even touch the surface, but I found this stuff over the course of the past few days and thought it way too interesting to not share.
A cool idea
Nerdtool actually allows you to use a snippet of a website as part of your background. As I was looking through the program, I thought of a cool idea for those of you who have a domain and hosting; with a little bit of time and work, you could set up your own little networking, blogging, or RSS home right in your “wallpaper”.
So what have you done with your desktop? Show us by posting in the FYI Flickr group!
