I was wondering at my Mac Dock. There were some Shiny dots at the bottom of some of the applications. I didn’t have any clue what they meant . I played around for sometime and later realised that the shiny dots were there only at the bottom of Application icon which were open . Basically the Applications wth shiny dots were running at that moment .

So this forms a new tip ( does everyone know it ? , i didn’t know it because i have macphobia ) - Shiny dots at the bottom of Application icon at Dock indicate that the particular Application is running ( foreground or background ).

In windows its pretty simple to know which appilcations are running by simply looking at the Windows task bar mostly. Or there can be background running programs in windows which lie in System Tray . Some other programs can be found at Windows Task Manager window .