How in the Tech

Force Any Application to Run from the Windows Tray

By Adam Myers ⋅ July 25, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Customization

Trayconizer is a light-weight program that provides functionality that allows just about any application to minimize and run from the Windows tray. While there are other utilities that provide this feature, Trayconizer is unique for the following reasons.

• There is no installation, instead it is just a single executable.
• It’s very minimal on system resource usage, right around the 2MB of RAM mark in my testing. When not in use Trayconizer will unload from memory. Even better, when using multiple applications that have the minimize to tray enabled, only one trayconizer process is used.

Configuration is straightforward and only involves the editing of the shortcut of the desired application from the Start Menu.

1. Right click on the shortcut selecting Properties and then the Shortcut tab.
2. In the Target box pre-pend c:\path\to\trayconizer.exe. In my example I’ve chosen to use GIMP – here is my Target field: c:\windows\trayconizer “C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\bin\gimp-2.4.exe”



3. You’ll now notice that when you minimize the application, it’s icon will be placed in the tray.

The short of it, I love this program and I highly recommend at least checking it out for yourself. Just be sure to grab the appropriate binary for your version of Windows.