As reported in TUAW yesterday, a reader named Ben G saw my recent tip for displaying iCal events and to do items on the desktop and took it one step further. Inspired by iCalBuddy, he has written a similar command line utility called twitterbuddy that instead displays the latest tweets by the people you follow. Getting this onto your desktop is pretty much the same process as with iCalBuddy.

Once you have downloaded twitterbuddy, double-click the install.command file to install it. To test it works, open up a new Terminal window and type in twitterbuddy -h. This should bring up the following list of options:

As you can see, typing twitterbuddy -u yourusername -p yourpassword -n 5 -t Tweets will display the last 5 tweets you have received, with the title “Tweets”. After perfecting your settings in Terminal, adding the command to GeekTool is easy. As with iCalBuddy, the only subtlety is that you have to use the full path, as shown below:

/usr/local/bin/twitterbuddy -u macosxtips -p ******** -n 5 -t Tweets

For help setting up GeekTool and formatting your output, check out the iCal on the Desktop tip, as everything is the same. Many thanks to Ali Rantakari, the deveoper of iCalBuddy and Benjamin Goering, the developer of twitterbuddy for all their hard work.

Also, if you want to, follow me on Twitter.