How would a system tray application be accomplished on other platforms?

Question

Windows has the "system tray" that houses the clock and alway-running services like MSN, Steam, etc.

I'd like to develop a wxPython tray application but I'm wondering how well this will port to other platforms. What is the tray equivalent on each platform, and how much manual work would be required to support Windows, OSX and Linux (which shells in particular would be friendliest).

Answer 1

wx is a cross-platform GUI and tools library that supports Win32, Mac OS X, GTK+, X11, Motif, WinCE, and more. And if you use it's classes then your application should work on all these platforms. For system tray look at wxTaskBarIcon (http://docs.wxwidgets.org/stable/wx_wxtaskbaricon.html#wxtaskbaricon).

Answer 2

Under OS X you have the Status Menu bar - the right-most items are often status-related things (like battery status, WiFi connections, etc).

Try searching for NSStatusBar and NSMenuExtra. It's almost trivial to turn an application into one that has an NSStatusBar menu and doesn't appear in the Dock. There are tutorials around on how to do it.

Answer 3

For many Linux desktop systems (Gnome, KDE, etc.) a Freedesktop's SysTray Protocol is implemented. You can try that if any other solution fails.