I've been using Wineskin for quite a while, and, as of late, I've been attempting to use Winemac.drv (or Mac Driver) from CodeWeavers more than X11. The main difference is that Winemac is fully programmed in Objective-C (including its Window system), while the X11 approach uses X11 dylibs and .nib files for windows.
Since Winemac's still in development, however, it lacks in some OS X functionality*. The feature in mind is bouncing on Dock. What's the problem with the bouncing? Well, it simply just doesn't bounce. More specifically at launch. The code somehow overrides the user's option for "Animating apps on launch", or does something that completely ignores the usual app launching animation.
I've still very little experience in Objective-C, so I might've missed some key documentation from Apple's Mac Documentation Library, but my question is:
Can apps usually override this option, or might this be the case just for Wine? If they can, how?
EDIT: I've stated incorrectly that the Mac Driver missed on functionality, when the reality is, as mentioned by Ken Thomases, that Wine processes start at background, so no icon is shown on the Dock at launch, and that means no animation.
I'm the developer of the Mac driver for Wine.
The issue is that all Wine processes start life as background processes with no presence on the Dock. Many Wine processes remain that way because they never present any windows.
When a Wine process does present a window for the first time, it transforms itself from a background process to a foreground process. At this time, it gains a presence on the Dock and in the Command-Tab application switcher and gets a main menu bar. It just so happens that the Dock does not bounce the icon of an app which transforms from a background process to a foreground process. Basically, the Dock is getting involved well after the process was launched and bouncing is for a process which is launching.
An application can make its Dock icon bounce by calling -[NSApplication requestUserAttention:]. However, this does nothing if the application is already active. Also, the bounce animation has a different quality. It's sharper and more urgent, rather than a relaxed bounce.
Basically, there's no way to achieve what you want for the general case. It may be possible to construct a script-based app bundle that configures the environment and then execs Wine. Since the app is bundled and describes itself in its Info.plist as a normal foreground app, it will get a Dock icon immediately and that icon should bounce. I'm not entirely sure how things will behave from there, in terms of the execed Wine taking over the Dock icon. Even if it works for the initial process, any Wine processes which are launched by the initial process will revert to behaving in the manner you're familiar with. (For example, many games have a patcher/launcher which launches a secondary process for the game itself. You might get the patcher/launcher icon to bounce, but that wouldn't help for the game process's icon.)