Every day in October I am going to launch a new Windows tray app. The first and most obvious question is, why? And there are a lot of answers:
- I love little utilities on Windows
- Native apps are best!
- The right sized tool for the job
- I won’t wait for big software vendors to soften the hard edges of their UX
- Small tasks deserve well crafted small solutions
Here are my goals for every app I release
- Small, tray focused utility
- Open source
- Signed MSIX installer for x64 and Arm64 on GitHub
- Free
- No advertising
- Native WinUI
- No web view
Without further ado here is the first app!
Tray Folder
I want these apps to be a boost to productivity, and you can’t spell productivity on Windows without File Explorer. Too many time to count I find my self reaching for a file to drop into Figma, or a blog post and I hate using the ‘open…’ dialog. It plops you in a random place forcing you to navigate to where you want to go. I want a quick temporary view into my downloads (or wherever) that I can pop open, and get the file I want, then go away. That is what Tray Folder is meant to be. I hope you like it.
Source code and MSIX installers here:
That’s it for now! I’ll be sharing more philosophy and hopes and goals as the month goes on. I hope you follow along!
🎃 Joe