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This “blog-entry” is still a part of ongoing “program reviews” serie, while today I will continue with the three programs that I know which enable their users to minimize various applications to the system-tray …

1. The first one is a program called Minimizer-XP from Totalidea Software: http://www.totalidea.com; it’s an only 79 KB in-lenght single-executable program which adds a special “minimize to tray” button (similar one to already existing min/max/exit buttons) to window with focus.

2. Then there is a second one called Winroll: http://www.palma.com.au/winroll; this one is also a very small and compact program (only 15 KB in file-size) and it’s writen in assembler/assembly language. Beside its primary “roll up/down window” function, it also offers a feature to minimize an application’s window to system-tray as an icon (same as Minimizer-XP mentioned above does) or to minimize it to Winroll’s “menu”, so that application is practically invisible to OS, and Process Explorer program: http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/processexplorer.html displays/pops-up a “No visible window found for this process” dialog when you try to bring it to front with its “Bring to Front” command. And as an addition to that, it takes much less CPU than Minimizer-XP, and it has a much smaller memory footprint.

3. Finally, the third one is a CLI program called Trayconizer: http://www.whitsoftdev.com/trayconizer from Whitsoftdev site. It’s a 10 KB in-lenght executable which takes a program’s path/executable as a command-line parameter/switch and starts it so that when program is minimized (by clicking the “-” button in the window’s header for instance), it minimizes it to the tray.

Well, in fact there is yet another one. The program I am talking about is called TrayIt!: http://www.teamcti.com/trayit/trayit.htm, however, I am only posting a link to its home-page, since I haven’t tested it thoroughly (although IIRC I did download it and run it once), so I am just adding it to this list of possible “minimize to tray” program-solutions.

P.S. - Oh and yes, all the three listed programs are the so-called “non-setups” (at least I call them this way), i.e. they are distributed as a .zip archive (or as a single-executable) with no special installation procedure required; meaning that one just needs to unpack them and execute them from optional location on the hard-disk drive. Also, if anyone is maybe interested in these programs in details, I’ve described Minimizer-XP and Winroll programs in this particular post: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/99609… (it’s on page 47) in the “The “neat application I stumbled across on the web” thread” topic on Ars Technica forums. Note that I also added very descriptive screenshots to it.

Regards, Ivan Tadej (user: “tayiper”)

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