Trayer is a program that runs applications as icons in the System Tray area, instead of buttons occupying the precious estate on the Taskbar. Trayer would be ideal for programs such as WinPopup, CD Player, or any background processing programs that you want to keep running without taking up any Taskbar space. With the new securities feature, you can even keep your minimized/hidden Trayer applications away from prying eyes.

Features

Originally designed just to run applications and add icons to the System Tray area representing their presence, Trayer has since been added some nice-to-have features. Just to name a few:

• the ability to hide or to show the window of the target application by clicking (or double-clicking) the icon in the System Tray created by Trayer.
• the ability to remove the Taskbar button of the target application completely.
• it allows you to configure the target application and save the settings to a shortcut, so that you can conveniently launch Trayer with the target application by double-clicking the shortcut.
• to run in an optional "Application Launcher Mode", which allows you to launch the target application only as and when it is necessary. In this mode, if the target application is already running, clicking on the icon means "show/hide" toggle; if not, clicking on the icon launches the application.
• you can decide what icon to display in the System Tray. You can also choose to enable the optional "Auto Update Tray Icon" feature, which updates the icon in the System Tray according to the icon of the target window itself. This feature is particularly useful for applications that change the window icon to indicate their current status.
• New! Dynamic Tray - allows you to "tray" active applications on-the-fly.
• New! Password Protection - keeps your minimized/hidden target applications away from prying eyes.
• New! some new options to "tweak" the target applications, e.g. to disable the "close" button, or to keep the window always visible on top of other windows.
• New! let Trayer monitor and add icons back into the system tray area when Explorer (the shell) restarts due to General Protection Fault.

Screenshot

More Information/Background

In Windows 95, the shell team in Microsoft has done a great job by designing the Taskbar that tells us just at a glance what applications are currently running. This effectively prevents users from running the same program again and again as we used to have in Windows 3.x, not knowing that an instance of the program has already been running and covered up by other windows.

On the far right of the Taskbar is the System Tray area. The System Tray usually contains icons that give you information about the launched programs which generally run in the background on the computer.

The purposes of these two Desktop components (the Taskbar and the System Tray) are fairly clear-cut. Unfortunately, there are many good applications written not making good use of the System Tray. For instance, WinPopup, which comes with Microsoft Windows itself, is neat. But I personally think that it would be more suitable for WinPopup to be resided in the System Tray area, rather than occupying the Taskbar space staying minimized most of the time, untouched.

Well, this is where Trayer comes into the picture.