I recreated most of my current GeekTool desktop in Übersicht this morning. Übersicht (which I found via Patrick Welker) is a potential GeekTool replacement which uses WebKit and Node.js to generate “widgets” on your dekstop. As far as functionality goes, it’s not much better or worse than GeekTool or NerdTool. However, being able to style widgets with HTML and CSS opens up quite a few aesthetic possibilities.
After creating my basic, boring widgets, I wanted to take a quick look at how things could be cooler in this land of CSS3. I created “Loadbar,” an animated, color-coded vertical bar that displays the 5-minute load average. It probably needs some tweaking, but I put it up on Github so others could play with it (and let me know where it’s broken).
If you’re using Übersicht, you probably know how to load a widget. If not, just download the package, unzip it, and put the “loadbar.widget” folder in your widgets location (use the Übersicht menu to “Open Widgets Folder”). More details are availabe in the README file.
A quick demo below. Given it’s a 5-pixel stripe on the edge of the screen, it’s a little hard to show well. But I tried…
