I was perusing the contents of the Script Menu bundle, and I saw that it had bundled icons for, of all things, shell scripts and perl scripts! So on a whim, I tried dropping a shell script in my ~/Library/Scripts folder. Well, it shows up in the menu with a nice shell script icon, and runs fine when I choose it from the menu, without opening up Terminal.app. I'm going to use this to run my X11 apps.
[robg adds: After some email conversations with discordantus, we've figured out why this worked for him and wouldn't work for me, hence the following qualifications on this hint:
#!/bin/sh
#
# fetch a fortune from thinkgeek
#
curl -s http://www.thinkgeek.com/fortune.shtml | \
sed -n '/(refresh for another)/,/table\>/p' | \
sed -n '/<p>/,/<\/p>/{/[.]/p; }' | \
sed '{/^<[/]*p>/d; s/<[BbRr]*>//g; s/<\;/</g; s/>\;/>/g; }' > \
/tmp/output.txt
open /tmp/output.txt
I then copied this script from my ~/bin directory into my ~/Library/scripts directory, and ran it from the menubar. The end result was a new TextEdit window containing a random fortune from thinkgeek.com. Hopefully, you'll be able to find more useful applications of this trick, but it does demonstrate that it works!]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030418030024194