I have written a small ticker application that displays the current bitcoin price in the systray. It uses the wx toolkit and I use it on Linux, but I guess it could work on OS X and even Windows. It comes with a configuration file that offers some options, and basic bitcoind and electrum integration (getinfo, launch electrum wallets, etc).

It uses python (py3 might work, but I didn't bother to build wx to test it) and a few existing bitcoin-related modules.

Source code at https://github.com/nkuttler/bittray