This is a simple script to display what is current playing in Banshee. The script talks to Banshee using dbus, and allows the outputting of track info and the use of templates...
A great amount of Pidgin's functionality is exposed through D-Bus, so you can do a lot with a script that uses D-Bus to communicate with a running Pidgin. D-Bus has bindings for many languages; this means you can write such a script in many languages including Python, Perl, C++, Java, Ruby, and Haskell.
This is the Ruby D-Bus tutorial. It aims to show you the features of Ruby D-Bus and as you read through the tutorial also how to use them.