Again, I’m not plucking anything new out of the Internet, but I came across these two dockapps last night and I’m highly impressed. (Some call me highly impressionable, though, so my opinion might not be so noteworthy.)

Both run a nifty geiss-esque dock box with a shifting color scheme representing system activity. wmhdplop, as you might imagine, monitors hard drive activity, while wmforkplop watches for processor usage. Check out their dockapps pages for screenshots.

Both have a really cool look when running at full bore. Compiling is easy (you’ll need libgtop2-dev, libimlib2-dev, hddtemp and maybe some others) and only takes a minute or two, and they’re definitely worth adding to an Openbox (or any *box, for that matter) setup.

As a side note, a lot of the dockapps are looking better these days. I can remember skimming over a site of dockapps about a year ago and thinking they were all kind of Windows-95-fugly-ish, but these are much smoother and much more interesting.

Three or four of these in a row would make a nice break from conky, if you were so inclined.