CUSTOM Animated System Tray Icons

Is it possible to do?

Published on January 12, 2005 By Ronan H In Docks

Hi everyone... Heres a kinda re-post of something i posted quite a while ago without much coming of it.

Picture the scene: For the sake of getting my point across, you are using a laptop. Were taking about the system tray, unskinned and untouched, just your basic Microsoft malarkey. Everyone is familiar with the battery icon you have when using a laptop? OK, it changes state depending on the amount of juice left, whether its plugged in to AC Power or not etc... Still with me? OK, heres my thing. Is it possible to have a CUSTOM Animated System Tray Icon to replace this? One that would act in the same way dpending on the power etc...

Now i am aware that there are docklets out there (such as https://www.wincustomize.com/Skins.aspx?LibID=29&view=1&sortby=4&sortdir=DESC&p=1&advanced=0&searchtxt=Battery%20Status this one by rylos) that do the whole battery thing and do it very well, BUT, they are standalone docklets that you use on an ordinary dock. You cant replace the battery icon on the system tray with it, as such. I know you can have it running in an ordinary dock, but i need to replace the system tray dock, and im SURE there are others out there who would love to be able to do the same thing, not just with the battery icon but with all of the system tray icons that change state. I know we are just a step away from this at present with the ability to replace the system tray icons with static PNGs, which is great, but surelt this step further is possible, or will be?

Feedback please, id love to hear from people on this...

Ronan H

Comments

Gollums

on Jan 12, 2005

Hey, I'd love to see the same thing, along with other SysTray icons that can change state like the volume, Active-Sync, and other multi-state icons. (YIM, MSN, Bluetooth status)

I am not talented enough to even try, but I hope that someone can figure it out!

DigitalCHET

on Jan 12, 2005

If I remember correctly, if you use IconPackager and change the application's original executable file icon then it will display the custom icon. Of course, I believe this only works for applications that display a static icon only.
The only other way I can see of doing this for those applications that have changing icons would be to change the icons in the executable file or .dll or whatever. But I'm not sure about that. Just a thought.

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