EventGhost-TrayTip

This program is not very useful on its own. It's a plugin for EventGhost. EventGhost is an automation tool for MS Windows which listens for events -- whether user-triggered (like the press of a hotkey) or system events (such as the screensaver activating) -- and runs actions you specify. (It's like Tasker for Android, or Cuttlefish for Ubuntu.)

Description

TrayTip is an action plugin (mostly) for EventGhost. It lets you add an action to your macros that shows a pop-up message in the Windows notification area. This message is mostly useful for informing the user of something, but you can also click it to generate an event.

Usage

Adding a TrayTip action to your EventGhost macro is no different from most other actions. The configuration dialog prompts you for several items:

• Icon: the icon you wish to appear on the pop-up. Supports built-in values for no icon, info, warning, error, and the EventGhost icon, as well as letting you choose a custom icon from a EXE, DLL, or ICO file.
• Title: this is typically shown in a large, bold font.
• Message: some more detail about what you're telling the user.
• Event Suffix: an optional string to add to the generated events (see below) to distinguish them.
• Payload: an optional string payload to include in generated events.
• Sound: whether to play the default notification sound or not.

The title, message, event suffix, and payload are parsed for python code wrapped in {curly braces}. If you want to include an actual curly brace, you need to double it up, as in "{{".

You can also call eg.plugins.TrayTip.ShowTip(title, msg, event_name, payload, iconOpt, sound) directly from a python script action if you wish. The event name and payload are still optional, and the payload doesn't have to be a string (but is only parsed for python if it is a string). If iconOpt and sound aren't specified, they respectively default to the EventGhost icon and sound enabled.

This plugin can generate four different types of event for each notification shown. In all cases, the event will have the payload you specified, which can be accesseed from an action by using eg.event.payload.

• TrayTip.Show[.event_name]: a new notification is being shown to the user.
• TrayTip.Hide[.event_name]: the notification is being hidden.
• TrayTip.TimedOut[.event_name]: the notification went away without being clicked.
• TrayTip.Clicked[.event_name]: the user clicked the notification. This is probably the most useful one to use in your other actions, since it's the only one that indicates actual user activity.

Although the event suffix is technically optional, you should generally give a suffix to each of your TrayTip actions. This way, when an event is triggered, you can easily tell which action caused it by checking the name in the event.

Before version 0.2.0, there was no event name option, and the only way to tell which action generated which tray tip was to check the event payload. This is no longer the case, but the payload field remains in case it is useful.

Downloads and Support

Official releases of this plugin are being made available at this thread on the EventGhost forums. You can also provide feedback and request support there.

I also accept issues and pull requests from the official GitHub repo for this project, Boolean263/EventGhost-TrayTip.

Future Improvements

It would be really useful to create notifications that persist in the Windows 10 Action Center. I haven't found information on how to do that yet.

I'm told you can add buttons to notification pop-ups. That'd be cool too, if I can learn how to make that happen.

Authors

• Boolean263, aka David Perry
• Kevin Schlosser
• topic2k

Changelog

v0.2.1 - 2020-03-28

• Support multi-line messages (thanks Kevin)

v0.2.0 - 2017-09-05

• Add configurable event name (thanks topic2k)
• Slight code optimization (thanks topic2k)

v0.1.2 - 2017-09-03

• Expand path variables (like %SystemRoot%) in icon paths (thanks topic2k)

v0.1.1 - 2017-09-03

• Bugfix: load .ICO files properly
• Hide configuration dialog while the icon chooser is visible, to prevent users from closing the configuration dialog with the icon chooser still visible (thus causing an EventGhost crash)

v0.1.0 - 2017-09-02

• Improvements from kgschlosser
• Generate events for all actions (though Clicked is still the most useful)
• New API (ShowTip() instead of showTip())
• Add icon selection (none, info, warning, error, EventGhost, custom) and icon chooser for custom icons
• Optionally disable notification sound
• Clean up resource leaks
• Some work to help the plugin deactivate cleanly if it's deactivated while a notification is still visible

v0.0.1 - 2017-08-21

• Initial release