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malja edited this page Apr 4, 2018 · 2 revisions

At the moment, there are two version of zroya:

  • zroya v0.1.3 (refered as zroya or zroya1)
  • zroya v0.2.0 (refered as zroya2)

zroya1

Latest version of zroya1 is available through pypi. Source code for this version is in master branch.

This version uses pywin32 library as backend. Pywin32 is a port of Windows API for python. Sadly, as far as I know, pywin is not compatible with the new UWP API introduced in Windows 8.

In Windows 7 and older systems, there was no Action Center. Notifications was assigned to application icon in Windows Tray and shown as a popup bubble next to it.

Windows 7 Notification

Do you see the limitation there? It is not possible to create multiple notifications for one Tray icon. If you try so, system detects that as if you were creating a new tray icon.

Since Windows 8, things have changed. This behavior is not expected on modern Windows. Application is no longer required to have a system tray icon to be able of creating notifications.

This led me to make a new version supporting UWP.

zroya2

Zroya2 is built on top of amazing WinToast C++ library. It supports new UWP API, which brings many advantages over pywin implementation. You may create unlimited amount of notifications, add buttons, images, sounds, and many more.

At this moment, zroya2 is in development and it is not ready for production. Source code is in zroya2 branch. If you are willing to help, download source code, build it via python setup.py install and test it out. Any bug report helps.

What is done?

Second version supports most of what WinToast does. Creating, hiding, changing sounds and images.

What is not done?

  1. In WinToast, there is an EventHandler class with methods handling different events occured from your notification - clicked, hiden, button clicked, etc. You are required to pass and instance of this class each time you create a new notification. EventHandlers methods don't know, which notification were they called from. I don't find this elegant, since I think tracking down each one should be possible. Instead I decided to build a central EventHandler common for all notifications. It gets called each time event occures with information about notification. From there, your function callbacks get called.

  2. WinToast doesn't support background activation. After application is closed, notification actions are no longer executed.

  3. Documentation and tests. This is the last step, since writing documentation at this moment of development would result in rewriting it each time I push a commit.

  4. Support for new WinToasts features. This is more a long term goal.

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