System Tray Iconquestion -> Resolved

[RudyL]

Is it possible to make my systm tray icon be a text box?

I would like to display a word (That will be constantly changing) is possible..

Any ideas?

Rudy

[ober0330]

As long as the words are not dynamically made, you could have different icons for the possiblities, and display different icons in the taskbar.

Short of that, even if you were making random words to put down there, you could probably figure out a way to have VB create an icon file which you could then use as the system tray icon.

However, with the small space that your icon is allowed to occupy in the taskbar, the words could not be very big at all, so I'd suggest you find another route.

Would it be just as good to change the caption of your form??

[RudyL]

Thanks for the reply, but changing the caption is not an option.

Let me explain the project a little..

There is this proggram, it provides stock market data for user difined tickers.

I would like to display one fo the tickers (User selectd) current stock price in the system tray. Just like Weatherbug does. So an example of a value would be "23.57" and that would be displayed in the system tray.

Rudy

[ober0330]

I don't know what WeatherBug is or how it works.... I think you'd be just as well off to make a window that "stays on top" and allow the user to place it wherever he/she chooses.

[RudyL]

I already have that. It works great, but I have gotten a sizeable amount of requests to do this.

FYI, WeatherBug is a program that will display the current temp. for a user defined zipcode in the system tray.

Check it out --> WeatherBug, it is actually really cool.

[Merri]

A demonstration I made for fun. If this isn't cool, what is?

[Merri]

Made it a bit more l33t and fixed a bug or two. Reminds me of demo scene.

[RudyL]

Originally posted by Merri
Made it a bit more l33t and fixed a bug or two. Reminds me of demo scene.

I have to say , that is really cool! It will take some time for me to figure everything out! Thanks for the example.

WAY COOL!

Rudy

[Merri]

Glad you liked it Some more tweaks:

'in Form_Load:
 
    'set the actual draw window width
    Systray.Width = Systray.Height * A + UBound(nID) * 30
 
 
'in Timer1_Timer:
 
        'copy a block
        BitBlt tmpIcon(B).hDC, 0, 0, 16, 16, Systray.hDC, (UBound(nID) - B) * 18, 0, vbSrcCopy

This little change makes the text go a bit smoother in the systray icons by not displaying the two pixels in between them.

If you have any questions, I guess I can answer

[RudyL]

Cool.. Thanks again for the example..

If you don't mind I would like to use it in my pgm.. With credit to you of course... I might make an OCX our of it.. So I can use it more often..

Sound good?

[Merri]

Yeah, I have no problem with it. I actually only combined an old project file from my archives made by someone else with a tip I found from here and I only required to add support for multiple icons and the graphics drawing

I guess the graphics could be faster to convert to icons through API, but I have no interest on starting to mess up with graphic formats