Similar to Rainmeter for Windows, GeekTool for Mac can be more subtle and is definitely more info-driven than straight eyecandy. These featured GeekTool desktops are a union of informative and aesthetically pleasing.
We've touched on GeekTool before, but just to refresh your memory: GeekTool is a preference pane plugin for Mac used to display various types of information on the desktop using a few basic plugins. While the plugins can be intimidating at first glance, GeekTool has a dedicated community that has already created a great launching point for those interested in taking the leap in to desktop customization.
(Images: 1. europevagabond; 2. daeee-i; 3. heipei; 4. JohnBanbury; 5. roebedo; 6. Oscar Doyle; 7-8. GeekTool Screenshots)
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Some other cool implementations of that toolset.
http://smokingapples.com/software/15-geektool-desktop-inspirations-for-the-weekend/
Wish my mac@work wasn't pulled for this new lenovo tablet.
Absolutely love GeekTool. I've taken a lot of ideas from other places and then built custom scripts for myself to do things EXACTLY as I want. My favorite is a set of scripts I wrote that give me a custom display (with custom icons) of the weather for the next five days in my area. I was never satisfied by how little information the scripts online supplied, so I had to learn how to use the UNIX curl command and have fun with it.
It's also great as a poor man's cron tool. You can easily set it up to run some background tasks periodically. Back before I was doing complete backups all the time, I had it dumping out a listing of all of my applications to a text file once an hour, that way I'd know exactly what I needed to reinstall in case of a major failure. I also used it to change my sound output device automatically, since my Mac mini always tried to default to my internal speakers on startup, rather than my USB-connected external ones.
The one thing I never adequately got it to do was to display iTunes tracks. It seems to have issues with displaying all UTF-8 characters, which is an issue for me, given that I have over 2200 tracks with Japanese names or artists. Other than that though, I've been very satisfied, especially with the latest version.
How the heck do I get this? I can't figure it out. This might be a bad sign for using it, but I want to try!
@raemcadams I had difficulty with GeekTool at first too! Start small and try out some of the stuff here: http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/geeklets/