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That's a different thing, though. Obviously NeXTStep had a dock for apps. That was probably its primary influence on UI design and why OSX/MacOS has an dock. That's different than "dockapps" which are programs that live in the dock which aren't just normal programs. The closest thing to that would be the clock/calendar app of NeXTStep (which does exist as a dockapp for WindowMaker)

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As I understood it, the dockapps of the Windowmaker world were basically a work-around for the fact that the X11 had no concept of a dock icon (or a dock at all, for that matter). On Nextstep, the normal Mail app would show status in its dock icon, much like Mail.app does on macOS today, the calendar app would show event reminders in its dock icon, etc. Your X11 mail app wouldn’t know that there was such a thing as a dock, so you had to run a separate little app to get the “biff” function in the dock. Then the Windowmaker afficionados took the concept and ran with it, creating lots of little apps that had nothing but a dock icon, a thing that didn’t really exist on Nextstep.

I think GNUMail and some GNUStep software supported notifications as dockapps. Such as the number of new mail messagges.

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