How to blink/update titlebar icon - without show()?

Question

Hello,
I'm writing a Swing application which, when certain events occur, should display a blinking icon in the title bar.
I am using a TimerTask to change the icon, something like:
class BlinkIcon extends TimerTask {
boolean iconOn = false;
public void run() {
if (iconOn) {
frame.setIconImage(imageOn);
iconOn = false;
frame.setTitle("ON");
} else {
frame.setIconImage(iconOff);
frame.setTitle("OFF");
iconOn = true;
The problem is that, with the code above, only the text title of the window (JFrame) changes. The icon doesn't.
However, if I issue a frame.show() after changing the icon, the icon changes. But show() has the undesired effect of bringing the window on top.
Can someone else recommend a solution? Is there something else that I could use instead of show()?
Thank you!

Answer 1

Strange...tried this on one of my apps and it works with no problem. Running in Win 2K.
I'm wondering if you are running into problems due to the fact that most Swing components are not thread-safe, meaning that methods that cause a change in appearance to swing components should never be called outside the Swing Dispatch Thread. (The Timer class runs any scheduled TimerTask in its own thread.)
Have you tried moving your setTitle() and setIconImage() calls into a Runnable and scheduling that using javax.swing.SwingUtilities.invokeLater() in your TimerTask, rather than calling setTitle() and setIconImage() directly in your TimerTask?