Minimise an app to an applet?

["Paul Barnfather" <plb clanger9 demon co uk>]

I was just pondering the usual minimise/restore behaviour of most
GUIs. I'm wondering if there's some improvement can be made here..?

When an app is minimised, apart from appearing on the Tasklist, it
doesn't seem to be able to do anything useful, apart from maybe
changing it's window title. Windoze appears to have a similar
limitation. Is there an example of a GUI that does something more
useful with it's minimised apps?

How feasable would it be, say, for a minimsed app to turn into an applet?
That way the user could still interact in a (limited) way with the app
without needing to restore it.
e.g: It could display a little progress bar. Or maybe even a "Stop" button.

Do you think this would make GNOME a better UI?
Can it be done with the existing API's?
How about "embedding" applets into the Tasklist?

I guess where I'm coming from is that there seems to be an unnatural
differentiation on the Panel area between "Starting a program" (Menu),
"Finding a running program" (Tasklist) and "Interacting with a program
that may or may not be running" (Applets e.g. the XMMS applet).

If I'm posting uninformed drivel, I apologise; please move on, there's
nothing to see here. ;-)
OTOH, if there's mileage here, it might be interesting to see what the
GNOME UI folks have to say...

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Paul Barnfather ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 
|  plb clanger9 demon co uk            paul barnfather vatechuk com  |
|      __           http://www.clanger9.demon.co.uk    .             |
     o--o-... 75TS                                    o'~o... 750SS