I need to include some kind of notifications in a sidebar gadget, preferably systray popups or sound notifications, so that they can't be missed/overlooked.
Is there any existing JavaScript lib or ActiveX that you could recommend?
A:
My company looked at PopupNotify early on the days of the Vista betas. It has a lot of features, such as skins, etc.
To quote:
Some of PopupNotify's Features:
- MSN, Office XP, and Office 2003 style interfaces
- Balloon style tooltips
- Many border styles
- Gradients can be vertical, horizontal, or at any angle
- Popup and tooltip can be made semi-transparent
- Automatic thumbnails and image resizing
- Configurable timeouts (also supports infinite popups)
- Automatic sizing based on your text
- Window drag and close button support
- Location persistence
- Text and pictures can be aligned 9 different ways
- Supports popup sounds (file or resource)
- Unicode and Right to left reading support for Arabic, Hebrew, etc.
The biggest downside is that it's not free. The second biggest downside is that different gadgets using them will overlap each other's messages. Those are the reasons we built our own in the end.
For sounds, your gadget can play sounds (well, wav files) natively using the System.Sound.playSound method.
Andy E
2010-03-12 13:05:27