Display numbers on a tray icon with SWT

Question

I would like to show some numbers on my tray icon indicating a number of events that happened to the user like what is done in this facebook notifications icons:

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Answer 1

You can do this using the TaskBar and TaskItem classes although it may not work on all platforms.

TaskBar taskBar = Display.getDefault().getSystemTaskBar();
// TODO may return null if not supported on the platform

// Get application item

TaskItem taskItem = taskBar.getItem(null);
if (taskItem != null)
  taskItem.setOverlayText("your text");

Also try:

TaskItem taskItem = taskBar.getItem(shell);

where shell is your main application shell. The TaskItem JavaDoc suggests trying both methods of getting the TaskItem:

For better cross platform support, the application code should first try to set this feature on the TaskItem for the main shell then on the TaskItem for the application.