I’ve made myself a simple wallpaper with categorized sections, which helps me be more organized. I am also recently using great Things by CulturedCode to do manager. I made use of Things scripting capabilities to display Today’s to-dos on the wallpaper.
Here is what the result looks like:
So here is how to do that:
1. Grab my wallpaper or use your own, as you wish. My wallpaper is in 1920×1200. If you would like a smaller version, please let me know, I will try to add them asap if demanded.
2. Get the GeekTool. It allows adding the dynamic elements to desktop.
3. Open the GeekTool in System Preferences and add the “Time” item with following content:
Adjust the font style, size, colors and position according to your needs. It’s kinda self obvious how to do that.
3. Add “Date” item as follows:
GeekTool uses standard PHP date and time formatting. So if you want them in different format than I have, use this as a reference.
4. Now the Things thing. Open Script Editor.app and fill in with the following code (if you are lazy or want to avoid typos, download the todo.scpt directly):
It’s written in AppleScript. Don’t worry, I haven’t done anything in AppleScript before this, but the nice thing about it it’s pretty obvious what the code does, cos it’s almost plain English. The only “strange” thing in the code is the first line, which just makes a line break between the todo items. UPDATE: the new script will open Things, get the to-dos and will close it again, if it wasn’t open before. You may want to change the update interval from 10sec to something like 10 minutes or so.
If you want to change the script to display not only items in Today, but maybe others as well, just replace “Today” with “Inbox” or “Scheduled” or whatever. It’s that easy. If you want some more complex functionality, like also showing the tags, due date, etc., please refer to the full Things AppleScript Guide.
Save the script anywhere you wish (just remember where it is 
)
5. Now add the “ToDo” item in GeekTool which should look like this:
Of course, use your own path to the script file. Again adjust the formatting and the position of the list.
Done! Now you should have Things to-dos, time and date at your desktop. Enjoy! And leave a comment how you like it! Thank you.
Tags: applesctipt, culturedcode, date, dynamic, geektool, gtd, things, time, todo, wallpaper
Ahoj.
Nice job man. I just thought about the same idea to display tasks from ToBeeDo while read about GeekTool. I’ll do it later when Today list will be done.
Btw, what is the application in your Dock with bee icon?
@Vladimir Thanks for kind words! The bee icon is for time tracking & invoicing app called On The Job: http://stuntsoftware.com/OnTheJob/
Nice write up here. It looks like Things has to be open for the to-do items to show up. Any ideas for a workaround that would work with Things closed?
@Nick: I’ve come up with the following workaround – the script checks if Things are open. If not, it will open it, take the data and then close it again. See above in post.
I am not sure how to do that without opening Things. Maybe accessing directly the Things data file. But so far I don’t know which one it is and what’s its format. Will google around a bit.
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It looks nice but i have got this message when trying to execute the script
Can’t continue «event THGSlogc». (-1708)
what should i do?
@peter2k no idea where that error comes from. could you please send in some more details at what stage it appears, what stuff you are using, etc. ?
Thank you, i have figured out.
The reason why it did not work is because there is no applescript support on version <v1.1
Hi, cool post. I have been wondering about this topic,so thanks for writing.
This is excellent. I’ve been wondering how to get the list of Things to-do on there for a while.
Thanks.
I was excited to see your solution for displaying Things on the desktop. However, after I downloaded the most recent GeekTool, I opened it to find an empty box under the Default Group. How can I access the options for Time, Date, etc.? Right now I’m stuck. Thanks.
@Edward just press the button “New Entry” on bottom left
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