Along the same lines, have you looked at GeekTool? There's a good write up of it on Lifehacker if you need inspiration.

I use something called "MenuCalendarClock" to get closer to my appointements and tasks. It doesn't display anything on my desktop, but I hardly ever see that anyways.

MenuCalendarClock displays it's own "Time" Widget in the Menu Bar, and if you click it, there's a drop down with a small calendar and a list of your appointements (configurable today or this week, I think). Very useful IMHO.

GeekTool looks interesting; thanks for the pointer, Jeni!

Martin, I also use MenuCalendarClock. But there's usually a thin stripe of desktop visible on the right hand side of my display, so it's handy having something that's unobtrusively visible at a glance.

Oh, and a feature that my screen shot doesn't show because I took it late last night is that the next appointment is highlighted for an hour before it arrives.

I was going to suggest MkConsole for displaying logs on the desktop but it looks like GeekTool has that covered. I switched back to linux when leopard was released and haven't kept up on OSX ware.

Dude, I'm getting seriously jealous of the fun you're having with the Mark Logic XML server. I'm sure it's out of my price range, but maybe you could get them to open-source a useful subset? Tell them how it would increase their mindshare.

Isaac((2^15)-1)

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