# MagicWB

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Workbench enhancer for AmigaOS

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MagicWB MagicWB preview screenshot used to market the package Developer Martin Huttenloher Release June 27, 1992; 34 years ago (1992-06-27) Stable release 2.1p / June 8, 1997 (1997-06-08) Operating system AmigaOS Platform Amiga Licence Shareware Website www.sasg.com/mwb/

**MagicWB** is a third-party [Workbench](/source/Workbench_(AmigaOS)) enhancer for [AmigaOS](/source/AmigaOS). 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 a complete package to enhance Workbench look with a complete set of icons, background patterns, and new fonts was born.[1]

## Features

The original Amiga icon sets supported only four colours. MagicWB extended the 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](/source/Magic_User_Interface) which used extensively MagicWB palette in its [GUI widget](/source/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](/source/NewIcons), was developed to allow more colourful icons. This eventually led to [GlowIcons](/source/NewIcons#GlowIcons) and finally to true colour [PNG](/source/Portable_Network_Graphics#Operating_system_support_for_PNG_icons) icons.

## References

1. **[^](#cite_ref-1)** Huttenloher, M: MagicWB Documentation. 1997

## See also

- [Amiga portal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Amiga)

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Adapted from the Wikipedia article [MagicWB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicWB) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicWB?action=history)). Available under [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Changes may have been made.