Yahoo Emoticons, Hidden emoticons (smileys) and Emotes in your system tray

• Download source files - 91.6 Kb
• Download demo project - 86.7 Kb

Introduction

Yahoo has hidden emoticons that I just could not remember as quickly as I wanted them. This handy tool sits in the system tray and allows one to get to all the Yahoo emoticons you choose to have.

I also added an Emotes feature like that in Yahoo chat rooms to express one's emotions. These are completely customizable.

Using the Demo

1. Run the program.
2. Right click on the Yahoo Emotes! icon in the system tray.
3. Choose "Settings..." and type appropriate filter names for your Yahoo chat windows. They will usually contain your user id or "Instant Message".
4. The filter will narrow down the list of possible windows to send the emoticon or emote to. When a chat window is open, right click on the tray icon and choose the emoticon or emote to send.

Notes

1. You will need to have .NET 1.1 installed on your computer for this program to work. If the program fatally crashes at the very start, you probably do not have .NET 1.1. You can download the .NET 1.1 framework here.
2. If there are no matching windows, the emoticons and emotes are greyed out.
3. If there is only one matching window, no submenu items are shown.
4. If there are multiple matching windows, the user has to choose from a submenu.

Settings

1. You can choose the list of emoticons to be displayed in the context menu. Go to Settings->Emoticons and check those which you want to see.
2. You can edit the list of emotes that you can send. Go to Settings->Emotes and enter a string in the form Title\Description.
3. Settings has additional options that you can set to work along with your yahoo chat settings.

Code

The code is reasonably commented to give a developer an idea of what is happening. However, it isn't in anyway path breaking to require an explanation.

Known issues

1. .NET has a bug because of which I have not been able to put an icon next to each context menu item.
2. Could somebody tell me a workaround. I really want this. People have suggested me to use NotifyIconXp that hansb wrote, but that seems to be a different thing altogether.
3. Sometimes, the program is just clunky and does not send out those emoticons or emotes. It might have to do with particular themes or particular non behaving windows. Will debug that sometime later.
4. Big memory footprint. The program takes very little memory after the initial window is hidden. After the context menu is first clicked, the memory footprint rises to a few MB. It might have to be done with the garbage collection in .NET.

Future changes

1. Put icons on the context menu.
2. Make it work for other messengers: I only have it working for Yahoo right now because it is the only one I am using right now. You can make this work for other messengers very easily. Simply edit the list of emoticons in code.
3. I had the option of making the list of emoticons as part of an external file, but chose not to for now.

Acknowledgements

To list open windows and activate a particular window, this program uses the code written by Taylor Wood.