README

CoolTrayIcon / TextTrayIcon

Two VCL components that put an icon in the Windows notification area (the "system tray").

• TCoolTrayIcon — the tray icon itself: tooltip, balloon notification, popup menu, mouse and keyboard events, icon animation from a TImageList, and minimize-to-tray.
• TTextTrayIcon — descends from TCoolTrayIcon and draws text into the icon, over an optional background icon. Useful for a counter or a countdown.

Both register on the component palette page 3rd_party.

Credit

Original components by Troels Jakobsen (freeware, 2006), with portions by Jouni Airaksinen. The original is at https://github.com/coolshou/CoolTrayIcon — this is a heavy rewrite of it, not a patch.

What this fork changed

• Fixed on 64-bit. The original stored the component's own pointer in NOTIFYICONDATA.uID and cast the message wParam straight back to an object. uID is a 32-bit UINT, so the pointer was truncated and the cast produced garbage. Icons now get sequential ids and a small registry does the reverse lookup. TSimpleTimer had the same bug in its timer id (FId: UINT) — it is NativeUInt now.
• Dropped the Windows NT code paths and the pre-Unicode Delphi conditionals.
• MinimizeToTray no longer needs an OnMinimizeToTray handler. Before, only the taskbar route worked without one, while the form's own minimize button fell through to a plain Windows minimize. Note for existing users: with MinimizeToTray = True and no handler, that minimize button is now swallowed, so Application.OnMinimize no longer fires on that route.
• New FocusFormOnShow (public, deliberately not published). True, the default, is the old behaviour — the component calls SetForegroundWindow when the owner form is shown. Set it to False when your application must appear on screen without taking the keyboard focus away from the user.
• New PutIconOnlyInTask and PutIconOnlyInTray.
• Breaking change, 09.2026: ShowBalloonHint and ShowBalloonHintUnicode lost their last parameter, TimeoutSecs. Windows has ignored NOTIFYICONDATA.uTimeout since Vista — the balloon now stays up for as long as the system accessibility settings say — so the parameter did nothing at all. Delete the last argument from your calls; there is no replacement.

Requirements

• VCL, Windows. Written for both Win32 and Win64. Developed and compiled with Delphi 13 (Athens). The code uses unit-scoped RTL names (Winapi.Windows, Vcl.Forms), so Delphi XE2 is the theoretical floor, but older versions are not tested.
• Application.MainFormOnTaskbar must be False, and it must be set before Application.Run. The components do not work correctly with True.
• Do not drive the component while the application is still starting up. To start minimized, use the OnStartup event and its ShowMainForm parameter, or let the application come up and hide it a moment later from a timer.

Files

Usage

procedure TForm1.TrayIconClick(Sender: TObject);
begin
  TrayIcon.PutIconOnlyInTask;
end;

procedure TForm1.appEventsMinimize(Sender: TObject);
begin
  TrayIcon.PutIconOnlyInTray;
end;

License

Freeware, same as the original.