GeekTool 3
September 28, 2009 at 10:12 PM by Dr. Drang
Today I installed GeekTool 3 (a release candidate, not quite a finished product) on my office Mac. GeekTool is a Preference Pane that allows you to show
- the contents of text files;
- the text output of scripts; and
- image files
in rectangular portals on your background Desktop image. It’s great for showing information that you want available all the time in a place that you can get to quickly, like the local weather or the current track in iTunes or Pandora.
I’ve been an enthusiastic user of GeekTool 2 for some time now, and have been looking forward to an upgrade.
The new version has a much nicer user interface. The Preference Pane has a cleaner look:
You can now place and size the portals with the mouse rather than entering coordinates (although you can still enter coordinates if you want that level of control):
And the properties of the individual “Geeklets”—that’s the cutesy name given to the things GeekTool shows on the Desktop—is now controlled by a single HUD panel instead of three separate subpanes:
All in all, GeekTool 3 makes it far easier to set up and control your Geeklets.
One thing I’m not happy with is GeekTool 3’s memory use. It seems to eat up twice the RAM that GeekTool 2 did, and like GeekTool2, the longer it runs the more memory it uses. I hope that gets addressed before the release.
