Google Mac Blog

There is an interview (2003) with the author of Launchbar (which does something like the article describes) where he explains how the concept evolved: http://macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/developer/2003/09/25/innovators.html

From the interview:

»I realized that I spent a considerable amount of time with task-switching activities — searching for the very same applications, documents, files and folders on my hard disk again and again. The better those items were organized in hierarchical structures such as folders and subfolders, the more time it took to reveal these items.«

[…]

»The very first "prototype" was not even an application. It all began with dozens of little shell scripts and a tiny Terminal window. Each of the scripts had a very short one- or two-letter name and just opened one specific application or document. The Terminal window was placed in one of the screen corners, allowing us to bring it to the front quickly using the mouse. When we wanted to launch Interface Builder, for instance, we just had to click that screen corner, enter "IB"«

The idea was later taken to the extreme by Quicksilver: http://www.blacktree.com/ — the author of which now does Google’s Quick Search Box: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-google-quick-search-box.html

For user notification, get yourself Growl.

tput and reset are present.

If you really have a VT serial terminal, then setleds is going to be an echo and a tr to ship out the escape sequence. Might be a different (or easier) way...

If you're working with a standard Mac keyboard (and not a VT terminal), here you go http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/04/manipulating-keyboard-leds-through.html

Applescript can do dialogs (there are hooks in Xcode) or the Applescript editor. (You can get the scripts stuff up in the menu bar for quick access.)

logger is present in Mac OS X.

pmset is a path akin to setterm.

smbclient is available. (Few Windows boxes have this path open, however.)

There are various approaches for the tcp stuff. Start with nc (netcat), which is built in.