GeekTool is a PrefPane to show system logs, unix commands output, or images on your desktop

As its name implies, this little fella wants to make Geeks its master… you know, Geeks: Guys (almost always) who want to see technical details no one else is interested in. Of course, this being Mac OS X, they want to do it in style, preferably right on the desktop or perhaps in a floating pane. GeekTool works as a preference pane and lets you display pretty much any web image, or the output of any log, or of custom unix commands. Did I mention it’s free?

Update 6/11/06

I really wanted to use GeekTool, and I did for about two days. I tried even though GeekTool would crash every half hour or so. Then I gave up, especially when I found GeekTool forgetting all of my settings inexplicably. I would set up a new desktop-viewing “group,” customizing the font, color, transparency, and so on… and GeekTool would remember it until it crashed. In fact, one or two “groups” persisted through several crashes. But it seemed that when I started taxing the software — for example, by asking it to display a photo from .Mac — it started forgetting and otherwise acting totally goofy.

Great idea… I’d love for GeekTool to work! But this isn’t Windows, folks. I refuse to spend much of my time fiddling with temperamental software and redoing preference settings I’d already done. If the developer continues work on GeekTool, I’ll probably try it again in the future. But for now, I’m removing the preference pane and consigning GeekTool to the “reject” partition.