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Tray Management Utilities Mini-Review

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taichimaster:
Hi Josh,

I have a question about PS Tray Factory.  I sent a mail to their support last week but never heard back from them.

I am wondering if there is any way to hide/show a tray icon based on the window text or caption as opposed to the wnd class?  There are apps like FeedDemon, PopTray or Gmail Notifier which displays different captions based on the current notification status.

For example, I want to configure my gmail notification icon so that it hides itself when there's no mail but shows itself when there's mail in my mailbox.  The tray icon has a caption of "No unread mail" when there's no mail and "1 unread conversation".  So I think it would be nice to hide/show a certain systray icon based on some pattern matching. 

Do you know if it does that or not?

Thanks,
Kevin

Josh:
I will have to check. I dont think there is currently an option, nor have I seen the option in any application currently available. i will email the author as well and see if he can do this for a future version.

jdmarch:
I'm sending the following comments to the author of PS Tray Factory. Perhaps it will be be of interest here as well.

PSTF is a big help. I just registered it a day or two ago, after trying several alternatives briefly, and then testing PSTF for 2 weeks, with increasing satisfaction. Then today I was browsing the superb donationcoder.com site and saw that PSTF got a very favorable review and is being discounted to members. Excellent! (No, I’m not asking for a retroactive discount; PSTF is well worth full price!)

I do have a few suggestions that would make it even more useful to me (I use Win2K SP4):

1. It's good that there are many keyboard shortcuts, but keyboard usability is still uneven. Here are some sample problems:

  1a. In the menu, pressing an alphanumeric key should move the selection to the next entry beginning with that character, as with any Windows-standard menu. It’s too laborious to traverse a long menu with just the arrow keys.

  1b. Pressing Enter in the PSTF menu often does nothing, so one must invoke the menu again, navigate to the application’s menu entry again, and this time press Shift+Enter. Very frustrating. The reason of course is that Enter is interpreted as double click, which many applications do not accept on the tray icon.

  At the VERY least, pressing Enter on the name of an application which was minimized to the Tray Factory menu should restore it to the desktop.

  For many tray-resident applications, the mapping of Enter to double-click is good. For others, the most useful mapping would be left click or right click. So it would be best if the Enter, Ctrl+Enter, and Shift+Enter keys in the menu could be remapped per-application.

  Without such mapping of Enter, I’ve mostly given up on using the keyboard with the PSTF menu, which for a mouse-challenged keyboard-centric user like me, is a sacrifice (and therefore a testament to how useful PSTF is overall!!).

  1c. You might consider supporting nested menus. These are very handy for traversing long menus by keyboard. But this is not urgent for me.

2. There seems to be a bug when an app which can only have one instance is minimized to the tray, and then restarted (e.g. using a non-PSTF hotkey, or by invoking it with DonationCoder’s ESSENTIAL utility Find And Run Robot). The app tries to restore itself but only partially succeeds. It appears in the Alt+Tab list but not on the taskbar. Its window remains completely invisible, but responds to menu keys (e.g. Alt+F drops down its file menu over the desktop. I know this is not necessary, as it does not happen with TrayIt! (a nice app which I used for many years, whose main job is minimizing to the tray; but which unfortunately does not neaten the tray as PSTF does).

The way I’m working around this is by giving each of the apps which I minimize to tray its own “Left Click” hot key, which I use for bringing it back from the tray. But I’d rather be able to use my normal method (launch hotkey or FARR) of launching or re-launching all apps.

3. It would help if one could specify that a given application is always to be minimized to the tray (or menu) instead of to the taskbar, without having to use the special "Minimize to Tray" hotkey or click. I know it's possible, as TrayIt! does this.

4. The Sort-Tray-Icons hot key does not seem to accomplish anything on my system. I’m probably mis-using it, but maybe more explanation in the docs would help.

5. It would help if the docs explained that explorer’s tray icons (e.g. Power, Volume, Unplug hardware) all stick together so cannot be separated when rearranging the menu. This frustrated me until I figured out what was going on.

6. Please show in the Tray Icon List, some indication of whether "Always show in menu" is checked.

jdmarch:
Another buglet: on my Win2K system, PSTF butchers the application icons which it puts in the tray, sometimes making them difficult to recognize. The application icons which it puts in its menu and dialog are fine.

DanielLanz:

Hi I use "4t Tray Minimizer". Its a Freeware and works very well.

See http://www.4t-niagara.com/tray.html for more informations

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