Tray It! – Get hold of your taskbar back

How many times have you thought, how nice it would have been if you can minimize the applications you need to keep open all day long to the oh so cluttered system tray! There are many applications like Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft Outlook 2003 which come with this option out of the box. Still, there are tons of other softwares that would have been much better if they had this option. So while you wait for them to incorporate something like that into the application, you can cover up the deficiency using the small utility I want to showcase today.

I found Tray It! while I was looking for a utility to minimize Opera to the system tray. I use Opera whole day long and prefer to keep a large cache in it. So, it tends to be slow when starting which makes restarting it again and again a pain. And there are times when I don’t exactly am surfing the web (like right now). Those are the times; I hate to see the application staying in my taskbar making things complicated for me (I have tons of other things open, you see!). So, I asked for it on the Opera forums and got Tray It!

It’s a 45KB download that takes around few Megs of RAM when enabled. It compensates by staying hidden in the background while you can access it from other applications directly. Just right click the minimize button on any application and you get a menu with the option to place that software in the system tray. It’s as simple as that! The application icon are instantly placed in the system tray and when you press the minimize button next, it disappears from the taskbar and hides in the system tray.

There are other customizations that can be applied to the utility. You can tell it to run at system startup so that its accessible from the word go without any need for you to actually run the application manually. You can also set the minimized applications to maximize with a single click on the system tray icon.

All in all this a nice little nifty utility that help you get rid of the mess on the taskbar and save precious desktop area. Give it a go and you would wish Microsoft had incorporated something like this inside the operating system. Who knows, we might actually get something like this in Longhorn!

Download: Tray It!