Notify the user about background apps

[AtkinsSJ]

Currently, you only know if a background apps is running if you check Task Manager. It would be helpful if there was some other indicator when background apps are running,. Android does this by requiring that background apps show a notification, but we could show an icon on the taskbar maybe, like the Windows system tray.

Not all background apps necessarily need to show up here. Maybe only ones running directly as children on the desktop? For example, Phoenix and any command line apps run from it shouldn't need an indicator because the user already knows they're running. But once a background app is running independently that seems like a good reason to tell the user about it.

This would also give us a place to add a context menu to interact with each background app.

[KernelDeimos]

256 (closed as a dupe of this) describes some nuances for tray icons

[aurium]

Just to help who want to solve this, a SystemTray (like) implementation needs:

• TrayIcon creation with linked app ownership.
• TrayIcon update for all features.
• TrayIcon destruction.
• TrayIcon features:
  • icon from any kind of image (from JPG to SVG), as a url or data url.
  • title (hint) to inform the user with a mouse-over.
  • drop-down menu, allowing to expose methods to the user.