Tray Icon animation

Question

I know how to place a icon in the Windows notification area (system tray).

What is the best method to have an icon animate? Can you use an animated gif, or do you h

Answer 1

Abhinaba Basu's blog post Animation and Text in System tray using C# explains.

It comes down to:

• making an array of icons each of which represent an animation frame.
• switching the icons in the tray on timer events
• create a bitmap strip. Each frame is 16x16 pixels
• use SysTray.cs

e.g.

private void button1_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
    m_sysTray.StopAnimation();
    Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap("tick.bmp");
    // the color from the left bottom pixel will be made transparent
    bmp.MakeTransparent();
    m_sysTray.SetAnimationClip(bmp);
    m_sysTray.StartAnimation(150, 5);
}

SetAnimationClip uses the following code to create the animation frame

public void SetAnimationClip (Bitmap bitmapStrip)
{
    m_animationIcons = new Icon[bitmapStrip.Width / 16];
    for (int i = 0; i < m_animationIcons.Length; i++)
    {
        Rectangle rect = new Rectangle(i*16, 0, 16, 16);
        Bitmap bmp = bitmapStrip.Clone(rect, bitmapStrip.PixelFormat);
        m_animationIcons[i] = Icon.FromHandle(bmp.GetHicon());
    }
}

To animate the frame StartAnimation starts a timer and in the timer the icons are changed to animate the whole sequence.

public void StartAnimation(int interval, int loopCount)
{
    if(m_animationIcons == null)
        throw new ApplicationException("Animation clip not set with    
                                        SetAnimationClip");

    m_loopCount = loopCount;
    m_timer.Interval = interval;
    m_timer.Start();
}

private void m_timer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if(m_currIndex < m_animationIcons.Length)
    {
        m_notifyIcon.Icon = m_animationIcons[m_currIndex];
        m_currIndex++;
    }
    ....
}

Using SysTray

Create and wire up your menu

ContextMenu m_menu = new ContextMenu();                                   
m_menu.MenuItems.Add(0, new MenuItem("Show",new
                     System.EventHandler(Show_Click)));

Get an icon you want to show statically in the tray.

Create a SysTray object with all the required information

m_sysTray = new SysTray("Right click for context menu",
            new Icon(GetType(),"TrayIcon.ico"), m_menu);

Create image strips with the animation frames. For 6 frame strip the image will have a width of 6*16 and height as 16 pixels

Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap("tick.bmp");
// the color from the left bottom pixel will be made transparent
bmp.MakeTransparent();
m_sysTray.SetAnimationClip(bmp);

Start animation indicating how many times you need to loop the animation and the frame delay

m_sysTray.StartAnimation(150, 5);

To stop animation call

m_sysTray.StopAnimation();