MagicWB is a third-party Workbench

Workbench (AmigaOS)

-Overview:Commodore named their Amiga computer's first operating system Workbench 1.0 and continued with the Workbench name until version 3.1, when it was changed to AmigaOS, prompted by Apple renaming their propriety OS from "System" to "MacOS"...

 enhancer for AmigaOS

AmigaOS

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000...

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

History

The idea to enhance Workbench arose when the author got bored to 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.

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

Magic User Interface

The Magic User Interface is an object-oriented system by Stefan Stuntz to generate and maintain graphical user interfaces. With the aid of a preferences program, the user of an application has the ability to customize the outfit according to personal taste....

 which used extensively MagicWB palette in its GUI widget library.

	| MagicWB palette
Colour
Red	149	000	255	59	123	175	170	255
Green	149	000	255	103	123	175	144	169
Blue	149	000	255	162	123	175	124	151

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

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.-History:...

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