How can I get the tooltips of notification-area icons?

Question

I can enumerate the applications (handle,pid,path) with icons in the notification area, and I can control the position of the icons, but I can't get the tooltip.

How can I enumerate systray icons including the tooltips?

Answer 1

The shell provides no facility for inspecting notification icons that don't belong to your program. (And it provides no way of enumerating even the icons that do belong to your program; you're expected to already know about those.)

I used to use a program that hijacked some or all of the icons and optionally displayed them in its own window instead of in the area near the clock, so it must have been able to get a list of all the icons. It was TraySaver, by Mike Lin. The source is available if you wish to see how his hack worked.

You can also take a look at the answers to a previous question that asked about controlling the position of icons in the notification area.

Answer 2

You should take a look at the madKernal package of madshis component collection. It has some interfaces for working with trayicons. Beware, though:

With madKernel you can manage tray icons (see API "Shell_NotifyIcon") of any application. This kind of functionality is totally undocumented, but works well from win95 to winXP.

The ITrayIcon-interface has properties for hint, icon, position and more.