Desktop Extension

Desktop Extension (DesktopEx) is a platform independent framework that extends Java GUI application developers' reach into desktop user interface. We are proud to release the first member of this family - System Tray.

The system tray is a section of the taskbar in the Microsoft Windows desktop user interface or the desktop panel in the Linux KDE platform. It is usually used to display the clock and the icons of certain programs so that a user is continually reminded that they are there and can easily click one of them.

System Tray of DesktopEx helps you add professional and native look and feel to your GUI applications. You no longer need to write native code using Java Native Interface. DesktopEx takes care of native coding for you so that you can focus on building Java applications.

System Tray is designed based on the Java AWT event model. This familiar event model not only kick starts integration of System Tray into your applications, but it also let you add as many listeners as you like to customize System Tray behaviors any way you desire.

While AWT event model gives you maximum flexibility, the easiest way to start integrating System Tray is to use SystemTrayTargetAdapter. It allows you to control what components to display when any one of the left, middle, right mouse buttons is clicked. SystemTrayTargetAdapter is specially defined to support any Swing or AWT components. You can use a JPopupMenu for right mouse button clicked.

You can even use complex components like JTabbedPane.

Features

Support all Swing components
Support all AWT components, except PopupMenu
Support icon image formats - GIF, JPG, PNG, Windows Bitmap (BMP) and Windows Icon (ICO)
Animated icon using icon rotation

Customizable icon rotation - number of icons to be rotated, whether rotation wraps around when the last icon is reached, and time interval between each icon rotation.
Maximum flexibility based on AWT event model.
Support mouse pressed, mouse released, mouse moved and mouse double clicked events.
Different components can be assigned to left, middle and right mouse button for display.
Components to be displayed can be auto hidden or not so that components can remain visible as long as you like.
Specially designed window that will not become invisible when contained components like JTextField gets focus.
Support Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP
Support Java Runtime Environment 1.3.x and 1.4.x.
Full Java documentation and sample code to jump start integration
Planned features in future release: KDE support, application bar (appbar)

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