As I mentioned a few days ago on twitter, I have been working with Geektool to really turn my mac’s desktop in to what I need it to be. I figured that since I had this brand new machine (read: my old one finally was replaced after 10 visits to the Genius Bar in under 3 years), I should make everything work the way I wanted it to while it was nice and clean.

I set out in this customization with a few goals in mind:

1. I wanted to be able to view the weather at a glance
2. I wanted to have the date/month visible
3. I wanted to have information from my iCal displayed
4. I wanted my dock to take a back seat in the visual hierarchy
5. I wanted everything to look clean

Here is the final outcome:

Setting up the Weather

This process was really easy, which made me happy. The weather part seemed like it would be the hardest, so it was the one I wanted to tackle first. To pull the actual forecast, I simply needed to send a request to Yahoo! weather with my city code (reference 1, 2), which looks like this:

curl –silent “http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=USKY0690&u=f” | grep -E ‘(Current Conditions:|F<BR)’ | sed -e ‘s/Current Conditions://’ -e ‘s/<br \/>//’ -e ‘s/<b>//’ -e ‘s/<\/b>//’ -e ‘s/<BR \/>//’ -e ‘s/<description>//’ -e ‘s/<\/description>//’

For the weather image, I took the PHP script provided by Paul Conigrliaro from iamawesome.net, added my specific city code for Yahoo! Weather, uploaded it to my server, and called the PHP script in the Geektool image box. If you would like the PHP script, please visit the Geektool post on iamawesome.net (dude deserves some extra traffic to his site, since it does seem he is awesome)

What the weather code looks like:

Day, Date, Month, and iCal

Amazingly, that was the hardest part of getting everything set up! The Date, day of week, and month are all simple commands in Geektool. The iCal integration was found on MacOSXtips.co.uk, in this post. They do a great job of laying out the steps for Geektool + iCal integration.

Date/DotW/Month codes:

(I wasn’t kidding when I said they were simple.)

The grey bar is simply an empty field that I set to a black background color and ~35% opacity. Since it seems that Geektool has a z-index, I just set the background field at the end of the list (making it the highest object), which softened everything a little. At this point, the Geektool side of things was set, but that pesky dock was still in the way.

Making the dock clear

I originally tried using Candybar3 to reskin all of the dock icons. I had found a nice text set called The Kobhens, and it looks really nice. The one problem I had was I didn’t realize changing the dock icons would also change the “alt-tab” icons. And while those text icons were really sweet for my dock, they are rather hard to read when alt-tabbing through programs. Each program lost their unique visual identity, which is what made alt-tabbing so easy.

Since I knew the icons would need to stay, I started searching for another option to manage the dock. I knew I wanted to get rid of the outline, so I first switched the dock from 3D to 2D, and in searching the interwebs came across Mirage. This haxie removes all of the dock background, leaving you with a clear dock. Aha!

Changing dock pinning

So now I had a pimp setup for my Geektool and the background for my dock was dropped like a (insert cliche here). But the dock was still in the middle of the screen, and it was getting in the way. I had tried to position all the Geektool output around the dock, but as I would open, close and minimize applications, the size of the dock would change, constantly leaving me with content that was covered. Somehow, I came across this article about changing the pinning of the dock, and it was exactly what I needed. After a quick jaunt to Terminal, I had everything where I wanted it.

Setting up the Stacks

The only problem left was there were a ton of applications in my dock, and most of them I didn’t need to see. I wanted to find a way to reduce the overall footprint of the dock, and I wanted to group applications in a way that was meaningful for me. I did a few searches on making custom stacks in 10.5, and found it to be really easy.

1. Make a Folder. Call it whatever you want the stack to be called
2. Go to your Applications folder, right click on the desired program and select “Make Alias”
3. Move the alias to the folder.
4. Lather, rinse, repeat for all desired programs in that stack.
5. Drag the folder to the right side of your dock (after the separator)
6. Right click on the stack, and under the “Display as” section, select Folder
7. Profit!

This is how I have the stacks configured:

I created three stacks: one for daily operations , one for design/school work and one for games. The stacks take up so much less room, and I know exactly where I need to click for any given application.

Daily Operations stack:

Design/School stack:

All that is left to do is figure out where I am placing my Bowtie output, after I load all my music on to this new computer. It will either go next to the To-Do list, or above the weather. I will just have to see how things are balanced. All in all, this (minor) overhaul of the Mac UI was really simple, and I am glad I did it. Not only did I give myself things I needed that were not included in the standard UI, but when people are staring over my shoulder in class, I get tons of comments about “ohh, how did you do that? That looks awesome”.