MagicWB is a third-party

Workbench A workbench is a sturdy table at which manual work is done. They range from simple flat surfaces to very complex designs that may be considered tools in themselves. Workbenches vary in size from tiny jewellers benches to the huge benches used by ...

enhancer for

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early version ...

. It was developed in 1992-1997 by Martin Huttenloher.

History

The idea to enhance Workbench arose when the author got bored with the gray and abstract icons provided by Commodore. The original Amiga icons could use only four colours and even those were scarcely used. The background patterns supplied with the operating system for Workbench were also minimal. Desire to develop complete package to enhance Workbench look with complete set of icons, background patterns and new fonts was born.Huttenloher, M: MagicWB Documentation. 1997

Features

The original Amiga icon sets supported only four colours. MagicWB extended palette of icons to 8 colours allowing more colourful icons. The MagicWB grew so popular that it became de facto standard for many major third party packages developed for Amiga. One of those is MUI which used extensively MagicWB palette in its

GUI widget A graphical widget (also graphical control element or control) in a graphical user interface is an element of interaction, such as a button or a scroll bar. Controls are software components that a computer user interacts with through direct ...

library. The design style in MagicWB was ''XEN''. The package includes 9 replacement fonts (Topaz, XEN and Courier) and new background patterns for the Workbench desktop.

Other Workbench enhancers

The MagicWB package grew popular but many users found limiting icon sets to 8 fixed colours too limiting. Competing Workbench enhancer,

NewIcons NewIcons is a third-party extension to the icon handling system for AmigaOS 2 and newer. NewIcons was first invented and developed by the Italian programmer Nicola Salmoria. Subsequent development was done by Eric Sauvageau and Phil Vedovatti. Hi ...

, was developed to allow more colourful icons. This eventually led to GlowIcons and finally to true colour PNG icons.

History

Features

Other Workbench enhancers

References

See also