Path: news.uh.edu!barrett From: nick@mentaur.demon.co.uk (Nick Ridley) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Magic Workbench version 2.0 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Date: 22 Aug 1994 14:41:52 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 457 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <33adfg$c0d@masala.cc.uh.edu> Reply-To: nick@mentaur.demon.co.uk (Nick Ridley) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: Workbench, icons, background patterns, graphics, shareware Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME Magic Workbench version 2.0 ("MagicWB") BRIEF DESCRIPTION Magic Workbench is a package consisting of carefully drawn icons which directly replace all those supplied with the original Workbench package, and many more for other programs are included too. There are a large number of backgrounds suitable for using in windows or on the main Workbench screen, as well as dock icons for use in conjunction with a program such as Tool Manager by Stefan Becker. New with version 2.0 are several other things such as 'image-drawers' and a few support programs: MagicWB-Demon and Magic Copper (for AGA users). AUTHOR Name: Martin Hottenloher Address: Am HochstraB 4 89081 Ulm Germany E-mail: xen@magic.in-ulm.de LIST PRICE Dependent on the terms of the SASG (Standardised Amiga Shareware Group). At time of writing this was: US$20,- DM30,- UK15,- FF120,- SFr30,- There are local registration sites available outside Germany in Great Britain, the US and Australia. I ordered my copy directly from the author. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE 300K disk space required on your SYS: partition. In theory, no other special hardware is needed in order to use this package, though in practice some things are a good idea: a) A hard disk is recommended. The enclosed Installer script expects you to have a hard drive with Workbench on it. For floppy systems with at least 1.5 MB RAM, it is certainly possible to unarchive MagicWB to RAM: and then copy by hand to a floppy, but I don't recommend it. Practically speaking, I suspect that people who want to run a high resolution Workbench will have hard disks. b) 1MB+ of CHIP RAM is recommended, though by no means necessary. I imagine that an Amiga with only 0.5MB of Chip RAM would be seriously limited if MagicWB was installed. An 8 colour Workbench plus a higher resolution screen-mode uses several hundred kilobytes of Chip RAM, and that doesn't count the RAM usage of detailed icons. c) A monitor capable of displaying the required screen modes without flicker will make life more pleasant, but is again not required. I have been running an interlaced MagicWB on my Philips CM8833 monitor for 8 months now, and I have survived the flicker. :) SOFTWARE Version 2.0 or higher of AmigaDOS is required. A proportional screenmode with at least 8 colours should be used in order for MagicWB to look right. Of course you can use neither of these, but then you will be wasting your time with MagicWB. :) A proportional screenmode is one where the pixels are square. The most obvious example of such a screenmode is Hi-Res Interlace. COPY PROTECTION There is no visible copy protection, though the author maintains that every copy of MagicWB is personalised, and thus pirated copies would be immediately traceable. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 1200 2MB CHIP RAM with Kickstart 3.0 (v39.106) and Workbench 3.0 (v39.29) GVP A1230 Series II 50Mhz 68030 plus 4MB FAST RAM GVP A1291 SCSI2 interface Quantum Pro 410MB SCSI2 Hard Disk Drive in external case BASIC INSTALLATION MagicWB 2.0 arrives archived on a single floppy disk. There is a personalised message warning you not to distribute MagicWB and a self-extracting archive which prompts you for a destination directory, reminding you that you will need 1.5MB of disk space. Resist the temptation to unpack this to RAM: as you will need access to all these files in the future. From these files, you can run the real installation program, but since this is in essence what MagicWB is all about, I shall discuss this in the review proper. INTRODUCTION When Edge Magazine published two pictures comparing the Amiga Workbench to the Apple Mac Desktop it made me feel quite ill. Why was that? The Amiga shot they showed was a beautiful black and white picture of the default Workbench being run on a high-resolution screen, and so it looked horrible. Many Amiga owners know that they do not have to put up with an environment like that since MagicWB has been available for quite some time. It has steadily become accepted throughout the Amiga community, it seems, as THE replacement icon scheme, as more and more shareware and Public Domain software comes with MagicWB style icons. Those not in the know may well have wondered what those strange colourful icons were all about. Read on. MagicWB2 is not strictly shareware, as it is only available if ordered from the author or a SASG registration site. A demo consisting of example screenshots is available (e.g. on Aminet - MagicWB20d.lha in biz/demo). The previous archive, version 1.2, was available in the past, and registered users had access to version 1.5. Due to the availability of this demonstration archive, I have not produced any example screenshots to accompany this review, so I advise that you download the archive. DETAILED INSTALLATION One of the first things that strikes you about the MagicWB2 package is the standard of presentation. The disk icon for the install floppy is very striking and introduces the MagicWB logo. Having unarchived the disk, you should have a directory on your hard disk which contains the package. On opening this drawer you will immediately notice how carefully all the icons and windows have been arranged - real care has been taken here. The real test of the package is how well the install routine works, though. Previous versions had an odd quirk or two, though it is no wonder - no two people have their Workbench partitions set up identically, so any install program has to be moderately intelligent. It is on this point that I can forgive the author for not using the Commodore Installer utility, as perhaps it was not flexible enough for his purposes. I still would have preferred to see Installer used though, simply for the sake of standardisation. The installer program does its job very well, and I uncovered no problems at all. In theory, I was updating my installation from version 1.2, but I cannot see that there would be any problems. Those curious to know precisely what the program is doing can find rough details of what is going on in the documentation. If you have an AGA machine the installer asks you if you would like to install the special 'Magic Copper' program and its associated backdrops. More of this later. A subtly different palette is used if you have an AGA machine. The final thing the installer suggests you do is to change the default Workbench screenmode. As mentioned before, at the very least this should be HiRes interlaced. 8 colours are needed too; though if you have an AGA machine and intend to use Magic Copper, you will need 16 colours. Running a high resolution screenmode with 8 or more colours will slow your machine's ability to open windows, etc. The author claims that MagicWB2 runs '2-3 [times] faster and needs 67% less chip-memory' than previous versions, and that even on a standard 68000-based machine, operation is still fairly speedy. I was unable to test this, though. Once the installer has changed all the icons in your Workbench partition, you are free to update the icons elsewhere on your hard disk yourself. A couple of utilities are available to aid you in this venture. The first is 'update drawers' which changes all the drawer icons to the new MagicWB2 style icon, and the second is 'IconUpdate' which is a very simple utility for changing single program/drawer icons. I did have a problem with the 'update drawers' utility, in that it did not deal with one of my partitions (a large, 100MB one) very well. After consuming 4MB of memory it broke down - presumably it needed more, due to an excessive amount of drawers on my partition perhaps. I was surprised though, as the author claimed that 300 bytes would be needed for each directory. By my calculations this means that I had roughly more than 13,000 directories! It seems most probable that this quirk was caused by a conflict with Disk Expander which I use on this partition and none of the others (all of which worked fine). However, specifying smaller groups of directories for updating caused no problems. A bit of a mystery all in all. IconUpdate on the other hand worked very well, and is by far the most intuitive utility of its kind that I have seen. A single small window appears on the screen and the user simply drags the source icon and then the destination icon onto it. Multiple destination icons are permitted. THE PALETTE Previous users of MagicWB may well be aware that the new palette for version 2 is slightly darker than before; specifically, on AGA machines where the palette can be controlled more precisely. There is also a new program called MagicWB-Demon that is run in the startup-sequence and makes sure that whatever screenmode is opened, the last eight colours remain set to those necessary to display the MagicWB icons, docks and backdrops correctly. The installer puts this program in both the startup-sequence and the user-startup file. The documentation says that the inclusion in user-startup is so that in the eventuality of your startup-sequence getting deleted you will have a copy of the command. Even if MagicWB-Demon can only be run once, I would still have preferred it if the second entry was commented out. Should you be using a 24bit graphics card, the author includes in the documentation suggestions for further palette adjustments. THE BACKGROUNDS After the icons, the second most important part of MagicWB is the use of background patterns for both the Workbench screen and the drawer windows opened on it. Workbench 3 has direct support for this, and for 2.x users a program, NickPrefs, is included. Over 53 patterns are included, 4 of which are specific to the use of Magic Copper on an AGA machine, and a further 8 of which are new to MagicWB2.0. The standard of these patterns is exceptional, and it is hard to do justice to how beautiful they look. They are of course suitable for other applications -- for example, Magic User Interface (MUI) -- though they rely on the MagicWB palette. Magic Copper is a shareware commodity which is similar in operation to the previously available program, WBVerlauf (both written by Christian A. Weber). It produces graduated backdrops using the Amiga's copper custom processor. These have been seen before in many an Amiga game, but rarely so beautifully done as with this program. The commodity is placed in the WBStartup drawer and has an interface which can be popped up with a hotkey. Two colours need to be selected using standard RGB sliders - one for the top of the screen (a starting colour, in effect) and one for the bottom. The program then produces a background which fills in between the two colours chosen. Two 'Random' buttons make selecting colours easy, and the results are displayed instantaneously. Thus great fun can be had just generating random backgrounds until something suitable is come up with. A background picture or pattern can be used in conjunction with Magic Copper - the graduated background simply shows through wherever a shade of dark blue is used. There are four such patterns included, one of them the now infamous 'Intel Outside' logo! As mentioned before the only real trade off for this fabulous 'workstation' style look is that you need to use a 16 colour Workbench. I also came up against a few bugs (mentioned later). THE FONTS MagicWB comes with 3 carefully designed fonts, all available in 3 sizes (not all of them the same). Different from the previous MagicWB 1.5 release is that the XEN 13 font has been replaced with a more usable XEN 11. These MagicWB fonts are extremely useful, as it is always difficult tracking down legible, small-sized fonts suitable for high resolution screenmodes. XHelvetica 9 is perfect for icon text, and XEN 8 and 9 are ideal for shells, list views, text readers and even buttons in Directory Opus. In many ways, these fonts are well worth the money alone (though almost all of them have been available for some time now in previous MagicWB releases). THE ICONS Almost forgot :) There are about 100 standard icons, and about 50 'image drawers', which are new to MagicWB2. There are also around 50 dock icons suitable for using with Tool Manager by Stefan Becker. For those who have never seen MagicWB-style icons, they are designed with graduated grey backgrounds so that they have a 3D look to them, and all have a 'selected image' which simulates the icon being pressed (some of them have different designs too). The improvement over the original Commodore icons is enormous! There are only a few brand new icons included in this package that were not available in MagicWB1.5, though all of them have been tweaked in that the background template that all of them are based around has changed subtly. There are a few new dock icons, though in my opinion they still feel a little large, and personally I prefer the style used by Osma Ahvenlampi in his TauIcons set (available from Aminet). Perhaps they work better with higher screen resolutions such as Super72 and Productivity - I was not able to try this out. The image drawers are perhaps the single biggest change in this release of MagicWB. There is a new default drawer icon, and if the user so wishes he can choose instead to use a drawer which includes a picture on the front suggesting what the directory contains. These alone completely change the look of your Workbench, and as with all the other types of icon, templates are included for you to help you design your own, though the author has covered most general eventualities with the ones he includes. SUMMARY MagicWB2 is very much a major upgrade to previous releases, and the list of changes in the documentation makes interesting reading - many things have been adjusted, and it is by no means just a case of a few newly designed icons being added here and there. DOCUMENTATION The included documentation comes in AmigaGuide format and is clearly laid out with the use of bold typeface to highlight important words. Generally everything you would want to know is here, though personally I had a few misgivings. Firstly, as the product is in effect a registered version, I would have felt happier if all references to registering the product were deleted - this would free up a little disk space for a few more patterns or icons. The author's email address was also available only from within the registration program. Secondly, I would like to have had more precise details included about what the MagicWB-Demon program did. It is possible to piece together what it does from references here and there, but I like to know exactly what any patch I run from my startup-sequences does, so that I can assess what may clash with other programs. On a more positive note, don't be put off by the author's remarks about a 'surprise' in MagicWB2 either - it is very good! LIKES Magic Workbench is beautiful - it will transform your Workbench environment totally. For those who concentrate more on working from within shells, it is probably a waste of disk space, but for anyone who takes pride in snapshotting their windows neatly, this is an essential purchase. Perhaps the most exciting thing about MagicWB is that it has already been accepted as a standard, and so there are loads of MagicWB style icon and background sets available in the Public Domain. A quick count on Aminet shows, at the time of writing. over 20 available sets of icons and backgrounds put together by other Amiga users, and more appear on a regular basis. You should be able to hunt down an icon for most major packages, and if not, with the aid of a Icon utility (I recommend the shareware Iconian by Chad Randall) and the templates provided with MagicWB2, it is simple to put something half decent together. DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS Well, I have very few that have not already been mentioned. Obviously, using detailed icons mean that Chip RAM and hard disk space are eaten up - for example, the new default drawer icon is at 1233 bytes almost twice the size of the usual Workbench drawer, but then it does have twice as many pixels! This will not cause you any major problems, and the author states that the icons take up over 50% less disk space than they did in previous versions. Perhaps if you have only a 20MB hard disk, using MagicWB would not be a good idea, but then it is probably time you got a larger drive anyway! In terms of Chip memory, I find that once my setup is loaded (with ToolManager docks and an 8 colour Workbench), I have used up roughly 0.23MB of Chip RAM. Thus, when I need to run programs which require nearer the full 2MB of Chip RAM, I run them before the Workbench gets opened using a popup startup-sequence menu ("Slect" by Asher Feldman). The previous MagicWB seemed a bit bright, but the new improved palette is much better. After a while you may get sick of everything looking a bit grey and wish that you could change it all. Magic Copper is ideal in these circumstances (if you're running an AGA machine of course) as it puts all the colour back into the screen. It is still a lot more interesting than the default Workbench screen, though! COMPARISON TO SIMILAR PRODUCTS There are other icon collections available for Workbench, though none of them are to my knowledge as comprehensive or as good-looking as MagicWB. If you are looking for a way to standardise the entire look of all your icons, MagicWB is the perfect option. Other collections include icons for the Workbench partition and little else. Due to the way MagicWB has been accepted, the right icon for your program is never too far away. Some other collections ask for 16 colour screens, but these may be preferable if you desire a more Windows-like colourful look. I have no doubt though that soon the MagicWB look will be synonymous with the Amiga Workbench. BUGS A collection of icons is harmless enough in itself, so it is the support programs (new to this release) which perhaps will cause problems for the user. Most specifically I have my suspicions about a major problem that I have come up against since installing Magic Copper. I suddenly started noticing glitches with my custom hires pointer. The problem stopped when Magic Copper was disabled, so it seems likely that it is responsible. Generally, my pointer sometimes changed unexpectedly from hires to lores and then to the default pointer, and back again. This would happen at unexpected moments, but often when switching from one screen to another in order for a window to be opened, and also when clicking on file requesters put up by the Commodore Installer program. I have mailed the author, Christian Weber, with reference to this, but I have not had a response yet. It is of course possible that the problem lies somewhere else entirely. VENDOR SUPPORT Martin Hottenloher responded quickly and professionally to all of my enquiries about Magic Workbench (email used). He is dedicated to supporting and developing MagicWB further, and will gladly help design the odd icon for spurious programs. If MagicWB2 sells well he promises to look into extending MagicWB from 8 to 16 colours (only required at present by Magic Copper). WARRANTY None. CONCLUSIONS For anyone who uses the Amiga Workbench seriously, a decent icon collection is going to be an important purchase. They do not come any better than this one, and the only real tradeoff is that you need to run a high resolution screenmode. This could dissuade many people who do not own Multisync/VGA monitors, but my advice is (unless you are epileptic!) give it a try anyway, as you may find that you get used to the flicker. I know I have. Old style icons last a matter of minutes on my hard drive nowadays - here is one other program you should consider getting your hands on - MagIcon (Aminet: util/wb/magicon.lha). This puts an appicon onto the Workbench, and when you drop icons onto it, the filetype is determined. If it is recognised, the image is changed to that of one that is preset by you. It works wonderfully well and is highly recommended for use in combination with IconUpdate as included in the MagicWB package. For anyone who has been using a previous version of MagicWB, I strongly recommend that you purchase this upgrade, especially if you are an AGA user. My advice is that you go and download the demo of this package off Aminet immediately, if only to get your hands on the SASG registration program. And while you're at it, register Magic User Interface as well. MUI and MagicWB used together give Amiga users a graphical working environment of which they can be justly proud, and which outshines those of any other home computer on the market - IMHO. :) COPYRIGHT NOTICE Review Copyright 1994 Nick Ridley. All rights reserved. .-----------------------------------------------------. !Email nick@mentaur.demon.co.uk (or br103@city.ac.uk) ! !Connected via Demon Internet Services ! !Amiga 1200 50Mhz 68030 410MB SCSI HD ! `-----------------------------------------------------' --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews