Windows taskbar (Windows 7?) -- how to set the application name in the Control Panel notifications dialog

Question

The Windows 7 Control Panel "Notification Area Icons" allows you to customize which system tray icons are visible. For each of the icons, it shows two things:

• an application name
• a subtitle

It looks like the subtitle comes from the tooltip text, because I can set that.

But what about the application name? I'm writing a GUI in PySide and can't figure out what incantations I need to do, to set this to something other than "python.exe".

Answer 1

python.exe will always show up if the module is run under the python executable, regardless of via a shortcut or not. It also shows up in task manager under the process name python.exe.

To circumvent this, it is necessary to create a custom executable to run the python script under it's own name. This doesn't have to be a monolithic exe packer such as py2exe, but can be something a little more discrete.

Using effbot.org's open source ExeMaker for instance, the following steps will result in what you want.

After downloading exemaker, simply run it from the command line with

exemaker scriptname.py

and it'll create scriptname.exe.

You may then run scriptname.exe by double clicking it, and it shall run the python script under it's own name.

The advantage of this small tool is that any changes made to the python script do not require recompilation of the exe - they are effective immediately.