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I have been testing Notifu for emiting balloons (traytip icons on notification area) on Windows.

Notifu on Windows XP

It behaves all right, but I was wondering if it exists a better and more featured software or way to do this.

For example, these features could be cool:

  • Links (URLs, email, file paths... etc) inside balloons.
  • Colors (background and text), sounds or even images for balloons.
  • Fonts definition, italics, bold, underlining... etc.
  • Time-remaining specification: number of seconds, minutes, forever (until closed), show only when user is present, show at anytime, don't show on screensaver... etc.
  • Queue of messages (the most difficult to find, I would say): multiple messages can be queued to be displayed (If you run a second Notifu message, it overwrites the first one, so scripting a list of notifications is mostly awkward).

Open source solutions preferred. Free or low cost preferred. Command-line capabilities encouraged (scripting messages, for programs like this one, uses to be a need), or at least some programming/scripting method (like extracting the message and its features from a file).
Desired to work on most Windows versions.

Any suggestions?

Tested until now:

  • AutoHotKey programming language. Not bad, but lacks most of the above features.
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  • I added the windows tag for you. You might want to either state a budget or add the gratis tag. The more information that you give us, the more that we can help you.
    – Mawg
    Commented Feb 7, 2018 at 9:46
  • Thanks you, @Mawg . Paid solutions are valid, too. But I prefer open source free ones. Edited original post.
    – Sopalajo de Arrierez
    Commented Feb 8, 2018 at 0:35
  • If you are willing to code, then IMO [AutoIt]9https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/) is far superior to AutHotKey. I can't say if it meets your needs, because, much as I have used it, I never needed to do that. Check it out autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/functions/ToolTip.htm
    – Mawg
    Commented Feb 8, 2018 at 7:19

1 Answer 1

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Notifu does not provide any visual customization (fonts and colors), because it was designed to blend in whatever version of Windows you are using. It does that by calling the same Windows API every other program does. That also means that it is subjected to Windows restrictions on pop-up duration, quiet periods and such the user selected. Another benefit is that it is screen reader compatible.

Timeouts are supported, but only if you hover the mouse over the popup. Again that is a Windows rule that changed back in Windows XP SP3 days IIRC.

As for queuing, turns out it is natively supported by Windows, and Notifu has a flag for it. Try this in a batch file:

start notifu /m "Start of processing, will be dismissed"

echo.Simulate some processing with a timeout
timeout /t 10

start notifu /c /m "Processing done. Acknowledge to display next message"

echo.Simulate further processing with another timeout
timeout /t 10

start notifu /m "Final message, displayed when everything is done"
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