OmniGrowl 3.7 and GeekTool 3: A clarification

One reader posted a negative comment on OmniGrowl's page on versiontracker, the gist of which was that he was upset that OmniGrowl seemed (in the release notes) to be making an "ill-advised jab at GeekTool" and was claiming to replace it.

Since we agree that the release notes could have been more clear, here is our reply to that comment:

We love GeekTool and have been using it for years. We love GeekTool 3 even more. The "better solution" we're talking about is specifically how to display iTunes track info and artwork on the desktop using GeekTool. We wrote one of those ourselves a long time ago and published it in WBC iTunes Scripts Collection. Similar solutions have been posted on several blogs, MacOSXHints, etc. The existing solutions have 3 limitations:

1. They all involve running 2 separate scripts (one for artwork and one for track info), and polling iTunes on a regular basis (several times a minute). This puts a huge tax on iTunes and eventually, in our opinion, makes iTunes unusable and therefore makes this kind of solution not really work.
2. The track info and the artwork is usually out-of-sync.
3. You have to have embedded artwork.

So, what we mean by OmniGrowl being a "much better solution for GeekTool users than anything currently available" is that it handles things differently:

1. OmniGrowl uses the distributed notifications system to be alerted of iTunes track changes, and doesn't need to constantly poll iTunes.
2. one plugin updates GeekTool at the same time, and uses the new AppleScript support in GeekTool to tell it when to refresh.
3. if you have the option to download artwork from the internet on (or even if you don't and OmniGrowl is getting the artwork from iTunes), then OmniGrowl is already caching an image file, so there is no duplication of this task on iTunes or the system.*

Beyond that it is really easy to set up. Just rename a provided template and then create two new geeklets in GeekTool with specific names. So as a GeekTool user too, please just try it and then comment back what you think! Thanks. (Viva GeekTool)

* For the even more technically inclined, I would add to the comment as posted on VersionTracker by saying that also, OmniGrowl will only cache artwork once per album rather than constantly copying a cache file over another cache file. Also OmniGrowl has an embedded transparent png file in the application bundle, so there's no need to copy that around the system either.