What AllTray Does

AllTray is a program written for Unix-like systems to enable a user to dock any program (such as Evolution, Thunderbird, or a terminal program) into the system tray. This is mostly useful when one wants to have a program always running, but easy to put out of the way. AllTray is developed and tested on GNU/Linux systems; some work may be required to make it run on other Unix-like systems, though not much work should be required at all, since most of what AllTray depends on is cross-platform (GLib and Xlib). The hope is that if any changes do need to be made, that those changes are minimal and easily maintained such that they can be quickly integrated.

AllTray is able to work with many desktop environments and window managers, though there are some issues. Not all window managers and desktop environments running on the X Window System do things the same way. If you run into issues with your combination of software, please file a bug report so that it can be investigated and (hopefully) worked around..

History

AllTray dates back to 2004, when it was authored by Jochen Baier. It was released under the GNU GPL, distributed on SourceForge, and there were (at least) 24 releases made. In late 2006, Jochen Baier released AllTray 0.70, which was his last version of the software. The only code history available is in those 24 releases, as there doesn’t appear to be a version control database from during that period.

In late 2008, AllTray was given to a new maintainer. AllTray's historic releases are preserved and available for download on Launchpad. The code for AllTray has been put into the Bazaar revision control system, a portable distributed revision control system which enables anyone to grab a copy of the code and begin working on it.

Presently, AllTray’s source code is undergoing refactoring and reorganization and other modifications to prepare it for more development. Among the goals of this effort are to minimalize the dependencies of AllTray’s core and pushing the toolkit-dependent code out to modules which simply manage the user interface. Currently, AllTray has a dependency on GTK+ to install on any system—including those with KDE, for example. After the refactoring is complete and the code is all re-written at the same (lower) level, the only thing that a dependency on toolkit libraries will be needed for will be for a user interface plugin for AllTray.

After the refactoring is done, development will commence for the 0.8.0 release of AllTray, which is the next planned stable version. The plans for AllTray 0.8.0 include increased compatability with various desktop environment/window manager combinations, session management support, and a decent number of bug fixes. The goal is to have AllTray 0.8.0 ready approximately six months after the initial refactoring project is complete.