Dockapps, or docked applications are computer programs which appear to reside inside an icon

Icon

An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...

 rather than a window

Window

A window is a transparent or translucent opening in a wall or door that allows the passage of light and, if not closed or sealed, air and sound. Windows are usually glazed or covered in some other transparent or translucent material like float glass. Windows are held in place by frames, which...

 in graphical computer systems, normally in a part of the user interface known as the dock

Dock (computing)

The Dock is a prominent feature of the graphical user interface of the Mac OS X operating system. It is used to launch applications and switch between running applications...

. Their display is constantly-updated just like a windowed application, but appears inside a small (64x64 pixel

Pixel

In digital imaging, a pixel, or pel, is a single point in a raster image, or the smallest addressable screen element in a display device; it is the smallest unit of picture that can be represented or controlled....

) icon.

This makes dockapps particularly suitable for monitoring things in the background, and some applications of dockapps are:

• Displaying CPU usage
• Displaying computer temperatures
• Displaying network
  Computer network
  A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....
  
   or disk-usage statistics
• Displaying clocks, calendars, moon phases, or weather report
  Weather forecasting
  Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a given location. Human beings have attempted to predict the weather informally for millennia, and formally since the nineteenth century...
  
  s

External links

• DockApps.org
• xdock - an application that emulates Window Maker docks in any window manager