have multiple tooltips/popups show neatly stacked in the windows systray area, similar to messenger/anti-virus notifications

Question

I am working on a program that monitors several things such as incomming messages, faxes, calendar items and alerts etc.

This program is normaly in the systray.

What i want to accomplish is to have multiple tooltips or forms pop up, one for every notification. When there are multiple messages to show, i want to be able to have them stack on top of each other neatly. Or maybe allow the user to have a couple of diffrent view types.

Can anyone here help me with showing multiple tooltips at once and how i can arrange them on the screen?

It can also be a form or something else, key is having multiple events at once and beeing able to arrange them.

Thansk in advance, Mike

Answer 1

If you want to place them into an object, you'll probably want to use either Queue<T> or Stack<T> to hold them. If you need to use them with threads ConcurrentQueue<T> or ConcurrentStack<T>. You'll want to make them Observable if dealing with bindings or use ObservableCollection<T> if you don't care about ordering and FIFO/FILO.

Other than that you'll need to give us some more information about what you are currently using.

For WPF: http://www.hardcodet.net/projects/wpf-notifyicon

Answer 2

The answer in below SO question might help you and give the direction, but you would still need to customize that code to hook up for event notifications: Creating a Popup Balloon like Windows Messenger or AVG

Additional information on ballon tip and its issues: http://www.csharp411.com/notifyiconshowballoontip-issues/

MSDN link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms160065.aspx

Answer 3

I would look into something called Growl:

• http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/default.aspx

You might want to check this page for a quick visual overview of what it offers:

• http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/displays.aspx