Dismissing System Tray Notification "Balloons"

System tray balloons such as the one below were originally used as a way of alerting you without getting in the way of your current task.

Unfortunately, they can be an annoying distraction if they're not carrying relevant information. For example if you temporarily turn off XP's inbuilt firewall to troubleshoot a network problem, you'll get a balloon pointlessly telling you what you've just done. A battle of wills between you and the computer now ensues: can you ignore the balloon until it closes, or will you succumb and interrupt your troubleshooting to hit the balloon's close box? Of course you could just disable such warnings completely, but that's generally not a good idea.

Happily, PTFB Pro can now dismiss these tedious little attention seekers. Here's how:

1. When the balloon next appears, create a new single-press item (not a macro)
2. Target the single press item on the balloon's close box

The resulting item can be edited just like any other. You can for example set a trigger delay of 1 to 2 seconds so that you get to read the notification, but it closes before it becomes an irritation. The only difference is that on the General page of the item's properties, the Action section now carries an explicit "Close Tooltip" option.

Points to note:

If you're running on a 64-bit version of the operating system (XP 64, Vista 64), PTFB Pro will not be able to extract the text of the tooltip. In this case, we recommend tightening the settings on the target identification page as much as possible - e.g. turn on "match window size". Note that this applies only to 64-bit versions of the operating system, NOT the more common case of 64-bit hardware running a 32-bit operating system.