2fast-team
[Feature]: Access from System Tray
Describe the problem this feature would solve
There is a competing app, called OTPKEY Authenticator
https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/otpkey-authenticator/XP9MCL9T4JFZ0B
- You can pull it up from the system tray which is something I'd find very nice.
- OTPKEY Authenticator is the first item listed in the "People also view" section on the Microsoft Store page.
I don't trust OTPKEY Authenticator
- Has no reviews
- Has a dead twitter with no followers https://twitter.com/certchip
- Has empty GitRepo's https://github.com/certchip
- Appears to be China based, based on their facebook pages
- https://www.facebook.com/otpkey
- https://www.facebook.com/certchip
Describe the solution
- Make 2fast available from the systray similar to the OTPKEY Authenticator screenshot below.
- Would be super convenient.
- Would prevent users from using a seemingly sketchy alternative that does have the feature.
Describe alternatives you've considered
I haven't really. 2fast was one of the few with a trustworthy looking dev https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-philipp-weber-07a871205/, an actual open-source repo, & looked to be more than just a toy project.
Thank you for your suggestion and the confidence in my application.
When I started the project, I also considered implementing this function in the application. however, there is a big hitch. My application relies on the universal windows platform (UWP) and cannot natively address the system tray icon. This requires an extra win32 application that interacts with the UWP application via an interface or bridge. See for example https://stefanwick.com/2017/06/24/uwp-app-with-systray-extension/
Since I do not want to integrate this balast into the application package for the function, I unfortunately have to reject the proposal for the implementation.
Dang. I had no idea. I'm very much still in the winforms & WPF era with anything modern being Electron.
I think thay may actually explain some jank I've seen in some modern apps with a system tray. Blows my mind something so basic is missing from a framework that was supposed to be a replacement/successor.
Is it also missing from WinUI3?
Do you have any opinions on Avalonia? I've always been curious about avalonia. Maybe one day I'll get bored & your app could be a good candidate to see if porting will be as straightforward as I've been lead to believe. While at it I'd throw in a basic open to/close to system tray to test the waters. Though before I began something like that, I'd need to know:
- Your reasoning for going UWP to begin with.
- If you've already considered something similar & dismissed it for reasons.
- If you'd be open to such a radical change & have a chance to actually get merged.
Avalonia is interesting, but not an option for my project, as I am already using the Uno platform for the mobile applications and will be releasing them soon. WinUI3 is supported by Uno and will in the long run inherit from my UWP app, when the performance has improved (AOT compilation), the UI feels more fluid, functions have been added and the error list has been reduced. In any case, I will continue to rely on UWP for a few more years and watch how WinUI3 develops.
The options for UWP for me at the beginning of the project were security, performance and fluid UI. Years ago, Microsoft said that the UWP would be the next platform and that everything would be focused on it. After the end of Windows Phone, however, there were practically no more new features and the UWP was then discontinued in 2021?
OTPKEY was the first app I used, before this app. That app was in the higher ranking in the search result in the MS Store. But, I recently found that that app is using something like 0.5% of the CPU constantly even when it's closed to the notification bar. It could be that the app developer was too dumb to suspend the OTP generation even when the app's window is not visible, but it could be some sort of doing suspicious thing. So, I moved to this app.
But it's sad that this app cannot have the notification icon because it used MS's half-baked, mobile first UI framework. I use C#, so I had tried to find a cross-platform UI myself but there was no good one. The best one I found was GTK and QT6, but there were no library for those for C#, so I moved to Python and QT6 (PySide6).
