Fix Windows notification color inversion

[rtibbles]

Summary

Fixes the Kolibri tray-notification icon rendering as a color negative on Windows light theme (#184).

Root cause: every entry in kolibri.ico was PNG-compressed, including the small 16–48px sizes. The Shell_NotifyIcon balloon path can't decode PNG-in-ICO and falls back to legacy XOR-mask drawing — XOR against a light background inverts the colors, XOR against a dark background leaves them intact. This matches the symptom exactly: inverted in light theme, correct in dark theme, correct in the tray icon itself.

Fix: re-encode the small sizes (16/24/32/48) as uncompressed BMP; keep 64/128/256 as PNG. Icon renders pixel-identically everywhere; no code change.

Testing

On Windows 10/11, Settings > Personalization > Colors, set mode to Light. Launch Kolibri and wait for the "Kolibri is starting…" / "Kolibri Ready" notification. The Kolibri logo should show its correct colors (yellow background, blue bird) — no longer inverted.

[rtibblesbot]

Clean fix for the Windows notification icon color inversion (#184). Replaces legacy ShowBalloon() with wx.adv.NotificationMessage, which handles icon rendering correctly across Windows themes. CI passing.

• praise: Good defensive fallback chain and error handling throughout

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@rtibblesbot's comments are generated by an LLM, and should be evaluated accordingly

How was this generated?

Reviewed the pull request diff checking for:

• Correctness: bugs, edge cases, undocumented behavior, resource leaks, hardcoded values
• Design: unnecessary complexity, naming, readability, comment accuracy, redundant state
• Architecture: duplicated concerns, minimal interfaces, composition over inheritance
• Testing: behavior-based assertions, mocks only at hard boundaries, accurate coverage
• Completeness: missing dependencies, unupdated usages, i18n, accessibility, security
• Principles: DRY (same reason to change), SRP, Rule of Three (no premature abstraction)
• Checked CI status and linked issue acceptance criteria
• For UI changes: inspected screenshots for layout, visual completeness, and consistency

[rtibblesbot]

✅ Resolved — addressed in the current code.

praise: Well-structured fallback chain: NotificationMessage → ShowBalloon → MessageBox. Each layer catches specific exceptions and logs before falling through, so notifications degrade gracefully on older Windows versions or unexpected runtime errors.

[rtibblesbot]

✅ Resolved — addressed in the current code.

praise: Good call keeping _last_notification as an instance attribute — prevents the NotificationMessage object from being garbage-collected while the notification is still visible.

[pcenov]

Hi @rtibbles - unfortunately the app is not starting in both Windows 11 and 10, seems that this is the relevant error in the logs:

Kolibri App Initializing
Started at: 2026-06-30 13:55:29.681412
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "kolibri_app\application.py", line 96, in OnInit
  File "kolibri_app\application.py", line 165, in start_server
  File "kolibri_app\taskbar_icon.py", line 172, in notify_server_starting
  File "kolibri_app\taskbar_icon.py", line 131, in show_notification
  File "kolibri_app\taskbar_icon.py", line 149, in _notification_timeout
AttributeError: type object 'NotificationMessage' has no attribute 'Timeout_Default'
OnInit returned false, exiting...

Logs: logs.zip

[rtibblesbot]

🔵 Review posted

Last updated: 2026-07-04 01:42 UTC

[rtibblesbot]

3 of 3 prior findings resolved — the prior approach (NotificationMessage) was abandoned entirely in favor of a binary icon re-encode, so the Timeout_Default crash and both praise comments on that removed code are moot.

Still open (not caused by this PR, but blocking a green merge):

• important: CI's "All file linting" (uv-lock prek hook) is failing, but this predates this branch — confirmed the same job fails on main's tip (a9f1e13, this branch's merge-base) via the check-runs API. pyproject.toml's exclude-newer = "7 days" is a rolling window, so uv.lock needs periodic re-resolution independent of this diff. Nothing in this PR (kolibri.ico only) can fix it — needs a uv lock regen on main and a rebase.
• suggestion: Since this PR no longer touches taskbar_icon.py, @pcenov's crash report was against the abandoned approach. Worth a short comment confirming they've re-tested against this narrower icon-only fix.

Verified the re-encoded kolibri.ico directly: 16/24/32/48px are now raw BMP (matching the Shell_NotifyIcon legacy balloon path that caused the original inversion), 64/128/256px remain PNG. Decoded all 7 sizes — consistent yellow/blue colors, no inversion.

Prior-finding status

RESOLVED — src/kolibri_app/taskbar_icon.py — NotificationMessage.Timeout_Default crash reported by pcenov (approach replaced with icon re-encode, not patched)
RESOLVED — src/kolibri_app/taskbar_icon.py:115 — praise: defensive NotificationMessage → ShowBalloon → MessageBox fallback chain (code removed, no longer applicable)
RESOLVED — src/kolibri_app/taskbar_icon.py — praise: _last_notification instance attribute (code removed, no longer applicable)

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@rtibblesbot's comments are generated by an LLM, and should be evaluated accordingly

How was this generated?

Compared the current PR state against findings from a prior review:

• Retrieved prior bot reviews via the GitHub API
• Classified each prior finding as RESOLVED, UNADDRESSED, ACKNOWLEDGED, or CONTESTED
• Only raised NEW findings for newly introduced code
• Ran the same phased review passes as a first review (core, frontend/backend lenses, manual QA when required)
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