Something that just struck me as handy, was Growl notifications for certain steps in the ant build process. If you're doing something else, its always nice to see "Build completed". I could go into a long process on how to create an ant plugin, integrate it with Growls' Java bindings, and have a very tightly integrated plugin. But I won't. Just install growlnotify from the Growl dmg, and use ant's exec command with "Mac OS X" as an attribute, so the Windows folks won't get unhappy error messages.