Different ways of show notifications from tray bar

What are the alternatives to balloon hints to show notifications from the tray bar?

What I want to achieve is something like Skype notifications, so I want to also have the feature of piling up notifications (in Skype we have John is online, Marc is onlin开发者_运维问答e and Jim is online at the same time). How can I achieve this?

Moreover, something nicer looking than the balloon hint would be better.

you can use the TJvDesktopAlert component which is part of the JVCL library, you can find an example in this directory jvcl\examples\JvDesktopAlert\JvDesktopAlertDemo.dpr

You can just create your own form and popup it as the tray notification at corresponding position.

You can create custom form and show it next to the system notification area. LMD ElPack includes TElTrayInfo component for exactly this purpose.

Have a look at Growl: http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/

It is a good looking UI