Tag Archives: systray

Yet another way to make your app support StatusNotifierItem

BlaBlaSoftware

Yesterday I was notified of this little neat project:
github.com/encharm/libsystemtray
(And yes its author would be very happy about feedback patches and so on 😉

Basically it’s a pure C++ library with very few dependencies that implements the support for StatusNotifierItem enabling systemtray icons in KDE Plasma 5 and Ubuntu Unity.
recomonded to be used by C++ applications that don’t actually depend from Qt or GTK and want to keep their dependency footprint very small (it’s Mit licensed so should be ok to use it from an app based on any license)
So now there are officially no excuse to not use our new shiny system tray 😉

Systray finally in action

Software

As Aaron noted, the client library for the new system tray specification has finally landed in kdelibs, as “experimental” (i.e. it will probably still see some refactoring for 4.4, assuring is as good as possible)

And is important also from the user perspective because another cool thing happened: some applications that will be shipped alongside KDE 4.3 have already been ported to the new protocol (thanks to Davide and Aaron for that :). They are: Kmix, Krandrtray (quick screen resolution changer),Kwallet (save the passwords) and korgac (appointments reminder for Korganizer)

Of course the quickest way to show what is the difference between the old and the new is with a quick video:


Ogg version

It shows the main charateristics: the pretty plasma tooltips and mouseover effects (you would get and those things even with say a gtk app that is using this protocol). Also the ability to show an icon in more than one system tray (think about multiple monitors) or having multiple system trays that shows different categories (or to hide some of them if you don’t care about them)