bryanculver.com

January 20, 2009 @ 22:30

To-Do On Your Desktop

*Note this article has been republished from it’s original publish date: April 22, 2007 @ 23:27 EST

I like to make a to-do list to ensure I get stuff done. If I don’t, I will most likely forget. Which is why I wanted to find a way to always have my To-Do List on my desktop so I remember what it is that needs to be done. But iCal’s To-Do list was out of the question because I would have to remember to open it to check it. Stickies was out of the question because they just don’t look appealing and the Dashboard hack to bring a widget to your desktop would only work until I opened Dashboard to check my widgets again. So what to do? GeekTool! (No you do not have to be a geek or a tool to use it.)

(select to enlarge)

As you can see, my to-do list appears to be a part of the wallpaper, when in fact it’s text on top of the wallpaper but non-selectable and auto updates. Here’s how to achieve this setup.

First: Download the latest version of GeekTool and install it.

Second: Create a text document with any app you like. (Such as TextMate or SubEthaEdit or even TextEdit) Just make sure you don’t use something like Word or any other formatted editor because this will fill the file with garbage.

Third: After you have filled in the basics for what you want to do, save it somewhere as a .txt file then close your editor. Now go find this file via Finder and right click it and open it with a web browser. I chose my favorite, Safari, but any will do.

Fourth: Copy it’s file:// URL, we’ll need this later.

Fifth: Open GeekTool via the System Preferences. You may have to select “New Entry” if you haven’t used the software before and it didn’t create a new one for you. Select “Shell” from the dropdown, then the “Command” pane and place this into the Command: input box:

curl file://path/to/list.txt

Of course replace “file://path/to/list.txt” with the URL you copied in step four. Set the Refresh to 15 or greater. Any less and you will have increased response time but seriously compromise system reliability and performance. You can use the other panes to customize the appearance of it. Mine are set to a transparent background, white Times Roman text at 75% opacity, non-shadowed window, no frame, left aligned text and no icon. Use the handle in the lower right hand corner of the “tool” to adjust it’s size and click and drag it into position. There!

Now close the preferences and you are all set. You will still see the semi-transparent background until you close it out.

Now just open the text file whenever you want to add or remove items and it will update within 15 seconds.

P.S. For those of you who noticed the File option in the dropdown, this won’t work because Geek Tool will only add the characters of an update that go beyond the initial list’s number of characters.