I run Windows 10. I'm trying to display a subtle but clear visual indication on my screen when my custom-built system tells it to, in some elegant/useful manner.

The first thing I do when reinstalling my OS is to entirely turn off the obnoxious "notifications" entirely. It is not an option to turn these on, because they drive me insane with how badly that whole system is designed, and they have so much useless noise. This is why I need a different solution.

In Windows XP, and perhaps Windows 7 (I forget), there was this really nice "balloon pop-up" kind of notification in the bottom-right corner. I wish I could get something like that back.

Ideally, I would just want a "Notification area" icon which simply visually displays a number such as "1" or "0" or "5", depending on what information I send into it with a terminal command such as:

update-notification-icon.exe 5

I already have created an entire "notifications" system of my own (the database and management part), as my issue is purely to find a way to visually display it in a manner which doesn't require me to press F1 on my keyboard, which I've AutoHotKeyed into loading my web-based control panel.

The only thing I've thought of is to play a sound every time my system receives a notification, but this gets annoying to say the least. I often record audio and then this pollutes my recordings, and sometimes I'm away when the notification arrives, so I'd still miss them.

Is there really no such little utility? I'm almost sure that there must be, but finding it is absolutely hopeless. Any search including "notifications" just finds unrelated garbage search results which have nothing to do with this.

I run Windows 10. I'm trying to display a subtle but clear visual indication on my screen when my custom-built system tells it to, in some elegant/useful manner.

The first thing I do when reinstalling my OS is to turn off the obnoxious "notifications" entirely. It is not an option to turn these on, because they drive me insane with how badly that whole system is designed, and they have so much useless noise. This is why I need a different solution.

In Windows XP, and perhaps Windows 7 (I forget), there was this really nice "balloon pop-up" kind of notification in the bottom-right corner. I wish I could get something like that back.

Ideally, I would just want a "Notification area" icon which simply visually displays a number such as "1" or "0" or "5", depending on what information I send into it with a terminal command such as:

update-notification-icon.exe 5

I already have created an entire "notifications" system of my own (the database and management part), as my issue is purely to find a way to visually display it in a manner which doesn't require me to press F1 on my keyboard, which I've AutoHotKeyed into loading my web-based control panel.

The only thing I've thought of is to play a sound every time my system receives a notification, but this gets annoying to say the least. I often record audio and then this pollutes my recordings, and sometimes I'm away when the notification arrives, so I'd still miss them.

Is there really no such little utility? I'm almost sure that there must be, but finding it is absolutely hopeless. Any search including "notifications" just finds unrelated garbage search results which have nothing to do with this.