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Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

If this is already an option, where is it? Otherwise... it would be neat to have an option to Minimize CMUD to the tray instead of the taskbar. Many other programs have it, and it's a good way to free up taskbar clutter. Smile

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

It used to be a feature in cMUD but was removed together with the theme engine. Hopefully it gets added back again Smile

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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2008 2:07 pm

This has been brought up so many times before, and it's easily searchable, too. Anyway, there's a 3rd party program that I use quite a bit and it works wonderfully for me. It's called TrayIt, and the link is:

TrayIt

Have fun.

Charneus

Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2008 5:23 pm

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

System try icons are smaller Wink

and I often run a LOT of applications.

Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 12:00 am

You might want to look into ObjectDock by Stardock. That is actually what I use on all of my computers. It has an option to populate a dock with the contents of the Task bar, or populate a dock with the contents of the System Tray.

So on the left side of my screen, I have a hidden dock that becomes visible when I move my mouse over it for common applications (sort of like the normal Macintosh dock). But then I have another dock along the bottom/center of the screen that shows the Task bar icons. And then a 3rd dock on the bottom/right of the screen that shows the System tray icons. Then I tell ObjectDock to turn off the normal Windows task bar.

Within the dock at the bottom/center, each running application just shows as an icon (normally 32x32 but you can change this). When the application window is minimized, it actually creates an icon that shows a screenshot of the window, otherwise it just shows the normal application icon.

Anyway, it takes up a *lot* less space when running multiple applications (which I also do a lot). There is a free version of ObjectDock, but I forget what the free version doesn't do that the paid version does (I have the paid version). I find it to be really stable and use it on most of my computers (both in XP and Vista). Lots and lots of customization options for it.

But yeah, it's too bad Windows doesn't have a better way to control how the icons look on the task bar. You'd think with all of the fancy work in Vista to improve the UI that they would have thought about this kind of stuff. ObjectDock has been around for a long time (well, ever since Apple started playing with docks) and it much more powerful now than even the Apple dock system. If I was Microsoft, I would have bought-out some of this Stardock stuff...it's a lot more useful than most of the other visual stuff they added to Vista in my opinion.

In any case, all of these kind of 3rd party tools are your friend. It's a lot better to run one of these kind of system-wide utilities (ObjectDock, or TrayIt, or whatever) rather than making each developer of each application try to implement these kind of system features.