Mac users love menu bar apps. These tiny tools let you quickly reference bits of information—my favorite, Itsycal, shows a calendar complete with appointments. But I could mention many more: MacMenuBar.com, a directory dedicated to compiling exactly these apps, offers over 1,500 of them.
Windows has a system tray, in the bottom-right corner, but it doesn’t have a similar ecosystem of tray icon apps. One man is trying to change that: Joe Finney. He’s the developer who built Traydio, the perfect Windows radio app, which I wrote about for WIRED back in May. That application makes it easy to listen to any radio station.
Finney has been busy building more apps like this, which do something useful while living in the system tray. In October he challenged himself to build one of these apps every day—there are some real gems. There’s Tray Sport, which shows last night’s scores for your favorite teams complete with a quick link to watch the highlights. There’s Tray Times, which tells you when your bus or train is departing. And Tray Radar, pictured above, which shows the radar for your area (I took the screenshot on a sunny day).
All of these applications are free and open source, so there’s no reason not to download any that look useful. You can browse the complete collection here.
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