“I am neither a geek nor a tool.”
Yesterday I mentioned how terribly inconvenient having to fire up OS X’s Console.app to view Unity’s web player debug log is. The in-game console script I supplied eases some of that pain, but there are still times when I find myself wanting to view Unity’s logs and dreaming of a fantasy land where this is easier to do. Propitiously, that fantasy land exists in a free utility named GeekTool, which through careful calculation I’ve determined kicks severe amounts of ass.
According to its website, GeekTool allows you to “display on your desktop different kind of informations.” Indeed it does. It can display images, the results of shell scripts, or in my case, the contents of text files. This is especially useful when the Unity editor crashes and I need to know why. At a glance I can see any errors that have occurred and all sorts of other funky information that gets sent to the Unity logs. When I’m not in development mode and don’t want lines of cryptic text cluttering my desktop, I simply turn off the “Unity” group from GeekTool’s menu bar dropdown.
Highly recommended.