Standards for System Tray applications

Question

Are there any standards out there for how applications that have a system tray icon should behave?

I recently wrote an application that sits in the system tray most of it's life. I handed it to a friend, and her first instinct was to double click the icon to get at the main window (which worked). But this got me thinking. In .NET atleast, there are all sorts of different events and ways of attaching things to your system tray icon (click [left/right], double click [left/right], context menus, off the top of my head). Just thinking about it, I've come up with applications with a right click context menu (most), left click brings up the same context menu (Live Messenger), a (different) left click context menu (Daemon Tools), left click opens the main window (alot of the Windows notifications), left double click opens the main window (mIRC, lots of other applications). I've yet to discover an application that uses right double click, though I'm sure it's possible...

Are there any usability guidelines or standards as to how your application should behave under any of these particular situations?

Answer 1

Unfortunately it's hard to have a standard when every one is different.

Double click to open and right click to have some sort of context menu are the ways I expect it to behave. Having an Exit command as the bottom icon on the context menu is good whenever it makes sense as well.

Answer 2

You may want to read Those notification icons, with their clicks, double-clicks, right-clicks... what's up with that? from Raymond Chen's blog The Old New Thing.

He even includes a link to Guidelines for the Notification Area (more commonly known as the "system tray").