How Would A System Tray Application Be Accomplished On Other Platforms?

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

Solution 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).

Solution 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 tutorialsaround on how to do it.

Solution 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.

Solution 4:

On Linux it really depends - you got diffrent programming environments there, and some window managers don't even have a tray area. Altho, if you use Gtk (and wx is Gtk really), the gtk.StatusIcon is your friend.

Here are some examples of that (haven't checked if they actually work, but should show you the path).

For wx I found some example code here.