Been playing with a nice app for Gnome desktop called
gDesklets. Here’s the description, from the project home:

gDesklets provides an advanced architecture for desktop applets —
tiny displays sitting on your desktop in a symbiotic relationship of
eye candy and usefulness.

Populate your desktop with status meters, icon bars, weather
sensors, news tickers… whatever you can imagine! Virtually
anything is possible and maybe even available some day.

The neat thing about it is… its written in Python. The second neat
thing about it is… its configured by XML! So, its highly recommended
for the average python hacking that is interested in doing something
neat with python on a linux desktop. I had a quick look at the
structure, and it seems pretty easy to get something running. I have
no idea of what kind of app would be nice to create, but something
that I would like to see is a desktop app to file/browse/comment on
bugzilla (actually I would prefer an emacs mode for bugzilla, but in
the lack of that, something python-based would make me feel better,
specially being configurable with XML).

There are loads (well, to be fair, tens) of desklets available for download, and even a
tutorial on how to make a desklet. Here’s a screenshot of my desktop
at my mother’s home, using the infobar desklet (at the bottom). At the
top-right terminal you can see the configuration file, open in emacs,
using nxml-mode.