For displaying information from programs in HTPC system, plain dialogs do not suit well with all their buttons, modality and other properties designed for desktop environment. Some kind of TV-like on-screen display would be much more suited. Luckily, X On-Screen Display library has very decent support for such functionality. The only thing it lacks is proper client. After some googling, I've found a small hack: onscreend, about 100 lines of readable C code, that I further modified for my needs. It compiles ("make") and installs ("make install" as root) very easily, looks decent and I'm mostly satisfied with it. Before compiling, you'll need xosd development package (libxosd-dev on Debian). If onscreend starting fails complaining about missing font, look for font definition in onscreen.c at line 21 and change it to some font available on your system (use "xfontsel -print").
If you by all means want to avoid C, compiling, and other übergeekish stuff, you may find satisfaction with a decent aosd_cat which will be satisfactory solution once it is finished, but may help you even today. Ideally, OSD should look at least eye-candy as that one in Amarok player, but I couldn't find any such utility. If you do, let me know.
As almost every part of this setup, program for printing OSD text is also easily changed, so it shouldn't be hard to experiment with new solutions.
