Question

I’m developing a desktop application using Java. I want to put an icon (with a contextual menu) on the system tray (called Menu Extras in Mac Os). Java 6 comes with support for doing this in Windows and Linux, but it doesn’t work in Mac Os.

I have seen some applications doing what I want in all three operating systems (e.g. DropBox), but I don’t know if they are made with Java.

How can I achieve this?

If it’s not possible in Java, is there any other cross-platform language able to do that?

Thanks.

Answer 1

AWT / Swing

According to documentation, OSX 10.5 update 1 and newer support TrayIcons

TrayIcons are represented on Mac OS X
using NSStatusMenus that are presented
to the left of the standard system
menu extras. The java.awt.Image
artwork for a TrayIcon is presented in
grayscale as per the Mac OS X standard
for menu extras.

TrayIcon.displayMessage() presents a
small non-modal dialog positioned
under the TrayIcon. The ActionListener
for the TrayIcon is only fired if the
“OK” button on the non-modal dialog is
pressed, and not if the window is
closed using the window close button.

Multiple calls to
TrayIcon.displayMessage() will dismiss
prior messages and leave only the last
message. If the application is not in
the foreground when
TrayIcon.displayMessage() is called,
the application bounces its icon in
the Dock. Message windows are badged
with the application’s icon to
identify the which application
triggered the notification.

noah provided this sample:

java.awt.SystemTray.getSystemTray().add(new java.awt.TrayIcon(java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage("foo.png")));

Note that you’ll probably want to attach a menu to that icon before adding it to the tray, though.

SWT

According to documentation, SWT 3.3 and newer supports TrayItem icons on OSX.

Icons placed on the system tray will now appear when running on OS X in the status bar.

This snippet shows how to create a menu and icon and put them in the Tray.