Here is the screenshot of Vojto’s wallpaper “in action”. It’s for tiny displays: 1680×1050

Grab the underlying JPG wallpaper here.

Now the scripting. It’s going to be just a little bit more difficult than with Things, but nothing to be scared of.

If you need the introduction to GeekTool, please see the previous post.

1. You will need Apple Developer Tools and Ruby, which should both be included in your Mac OS installation.

2. You will need rb-appscript which you install by entering “sudo gem install rb-appscript” in terminal. This makes application scriptable using Ruby (alternatively Python or ObjC). If you don’t know what the hell does it mean, just don’t care and proceed

3. Now create file ~/.hitlist and put in the following code UPDATE: the new code checks if The Hit List is open, and if not, it will close it again after taking the to-dos from it.

#!/usr/bin/ruby 

# Load up appscript
begin; require 'rubygems'; rescue LoadError; end
require 'appscript'

# Load Hit List and check if running
thl=Appscript.app('The Hit List')
begin
  wasnt_running = true
  thl.run
end unless thl.is_running?

# Get todos
puts thl.today_list.tasks.get.find_all { |t|
  !t.completed.get
}.map{ |t|
  t.title.get
}.join("\n")

thl.quit if wasnt_running

Save & close

4. In terminal, type “chmod +x ~/.hitlist” to allow reading from this file.

5. Open the geek tool and add new item as follows:

And you should be done! Enjoy!

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.