I have already started work on it but whether I continue to develop it or not depends on your feedback. The official shareware version of MagicWB and this new website are means for me to test if you are still interested in a further development of MagicWB. If you are interested in the future of MagicWB you should read the future text.

There are a few obvious reasons:

• MagicWB is shareware and by using it you accept the concepts of shareware which imply that you must register the product if you like it and continue using it.

• By registering MagicWB you will receive the full, feature-enhanced version which has much more to offer than the feature-reduced shareware version. With it you will get a genuine MagicWB environment which unlocks your door to over 6000 extensions of 3rd-party MagicWB archives and also lets you enjoy applications that use the MagicWB standard.

• Registering a shareware product is important when you like the product and would love to see extensions, improvements and new versions (updates). A continuing development of a shareware product is only possible when a broad user base is willing to support the author with their registrations. In the case of MagicWB it is vital that you register it if you like it to ensure a future for MagicWB. Please read about the future for more information.

• By registering you will feel better since you don't need to steal.

I would definitely recommend Iconian. This is a feature-loaded icon editor that supports MagicWB through various functions which are especially useful for MagicWB users. It is well-programmed and can be downloaded from Aminet (directory 'util/wb').

The answer is simple: Register it! If you are using MagicWB icons, patterns and colors and have not installed the registered version you are not able to experience the look & feel of MagicWB. The full, registered version provides you with a genuine MagicWB environment with which you are able to enjoy and use all the 3rd-party icon collections and programs that support the MagicWB standard. There are hundreds of applications you can use after you have registered and installed MagicWB!

Yes. When you think you can stand the old and dull Commodore look on your workbench you can just uninstall MagicWB by re-installing the Commodore system disks. This will not delete any personal settings, it will just replace your icons and default system files. Additionally you should delete the file 'MagicWB' in your 'ENVARC:' directory and remove the 'MagicWB-Demon' line from your startup-sequence and user-startup. This is it.

NewIcons' icons were made by Roger McVey whose only purpose was to attack me and my product MagicWB in the utmost disgusting, cheap and proletarian way possible. Read the introduction text to NewIcons and you will obviously understand that this piece of work can not be taken seriously; neither intellectually nor artistically. NewIcons was meant to be an uninspired and cheap aggressive act to weaken the wide acceptance of MagicWB by its users. The creator of these "icons" proclaimed himself as the reference artist when it comes to icon creation and officially called me a "fiendish, diseased pervert" in his documentation amongst many other insults and profile-neurotic mental diarrhea with which his introductory text is filled. To this day I do not understand why this person needs to attack me in that vulgar way; I have never written to, talked with or even met this person in my whole life, I do not know him at all. I can only guess that this man is suffering from a severe inferiority complex. So does his work 'NewIcons':

• it is based on hatred and therefore totally uninspired
• it is artistically not appealing since the style of these icons is crude and far from being photorealistic (Mr. McVey is not even capable of anti-aliasing his icons which indicates how untalented he is)
• its palette's color selection is so incompetent that it resulted in an unrealistic "ketchup & mustard" play-toy-look (which of course is a matter of taste)
• it is restricting the user to a rigid and inapt icon size, thus eliminating the possibility to quickly recognize different icon types by their forms. Furthermore NewIcons' icon size is contradicting all rules of professional layouting.
• it has not succeeded in creating a wide user-base and failed to be a standard and is neither accepted as such by shareware & freeware authors nor commercial applications. MagicWB in the opposite is responsible for the biggest avalanche of MWB-style icon sets in the history of the Amiga. Over 6000 icons and an unparalleled acceptance as the Amiga workbench standard amongst users, programmers and magazines is proof enough for the vast superiority of MagicWB. It is so established that its name and style are even known on other computer platforms!
• NewIcons is totally incompatible with the AmigaOS and a bad "hack". The side-effects are numerous and do compromise your system.
• it is very, very slow. Even on systems powered with an 040 processor the unefficient way NewIcons hacks the system results in an immense delay of icon build-up on your workbench.
• NewIcon's icons generally only use a few colors, but nevertheless it saves all icons as 8bit data in all cases, which is absurd and incompetent. This is a waste of resources. Given the fact that this redundant data is stored in the icon's tooltypes and merely encoded with a very small ascii-charset, it makes the size of the icons even bigger. This whole concept is wasting diskspace, memory and renders the workbench down to a snail's pace.
• it is so cheap that it even costs nothing! What can you expect of a product of which the mere reason for existence is hate & envy towards MagicWB, thus trying to hurt its development by offensively releasing NewIcons for free. Quality has its price -- MagicWB is quality!

I do not object competition, if it's fair and my competitor is gifted both with talent and common sense. But NewIcons is nothing of that -- it's a joke. Do not be taken in by it, it's a waste of time and effort. If you are still not convinced of MagicWB's quality then read what truly competent people have to say about MagicWB. The renowned Maxwell Daymon wrote the following:

"I asked a professional artist with over 30 years of experience in both fine art and commercial art what he thought of "MagicWB"; he has done work for many major corporations such as Digital and Hewlett Packard, and has curated numerous fine art shows. He is also a teacher with 12 years behind him. He stated that MagicWB is the most creative and artistically sophisticated icon collection that he has encountered on any platform including Mac, Windows, OS/2, SGI, Xerox, and other specialized systems."

The MagicWB-Demon is a little program that is started in the startup-sequence. It is responsible for the high speed of MagicWB (icon build-up etc.) in all possible screen depths (i.e. number of colors). Without it the icons would be displayed in wrong colors or MagicWB would be very slow and consume a lot of chip memory. It is a remedy for some misconceptions in the AmigaOS concerning multi-colored icons. The demon is not a hack, it is highly system compliant and should be considered as an extension to the operating system.

The demon must be started in the startup-sequence before the 'IPrefs' line and after the 'ENV:' assignment. This is important in order for it to work properly. It is run a second time in the user-startup. This is done for safety reasons: If the demon was already started in the startup-sequence it won't be executed a second time in the user-startup. But when your startup-sequence should be accidently owerwritten (by a bad installer for example), the demon will still be launched from within the user-startup. This place is not as good as in the startup-sequence but it will ensure that MagicWB always runs correctly even after such potential accidents to your startup-sequence.

You can but you should not! The MagicWB palette is highly optimized and changing it will result in a worse look & feel of your icons. The bigger problem is that when you change the palette other programs which use MagicWB-style graphics and colors will not recognise that MagicWB is installed and will act differently (i.e. will remap and display them incorrectly or won't display them at all). But if you know what you are doing and are an experienced user you can change the palette slightly in order to compensate for some flaws in your graphic card for example. The colors are set in the MagicWB-Demon line in the startup-sequence. They are given in the format [color#],[R],[G],[B]. The RGB values are 8-bit values. For more usage information start the MagicWB-Demon.

Definitely not! Other color allcation tools on Aminet (like AdjustWBColors, ProcurePens, ShoveColors, PatchPens etc.) are simple color allocation tools. They will take care that the MagicWB icons are displayed correctly but can not perform some proprietary functions which are important for a correctly working MagicWB environment (e.g. the detection of MagicWB tags in patterns which ensures that they are remapped correctly and not dithered!). These color tools can only allocate colors. The MagicWB-Demon on the other hand is an extension to the AmigaOS color management and remapping routines and copes with some outdated misconceptions in the Amiga operating system. Do not replace the demon! It is small and effective and there should be no reason to replace it, except when you intend to uninstall MagicWB from your system. You have been warned.

The random appearance of this MagicWB trailer was meant to be a gag to amuse MagicWB users. It is neither a virus (as some people stated) nor is it an advertisement for MagicWB (why should I advertise MagicWB on an Amiga that is already running a registered version of MagicWB?). When you closely watch the work that was invested in this trailer (animations, surround sound, compatibility etc.) you will realize that it is more than just a boot screen. Many users liked that surprise trailer so much that they wanted it permanently.

This was meant to be a secret "backdoor" but it is now time to release this information: The trailer is started through the 'MagicWB-Demon' startup line in the 'startup-sequence'. Locate this line and add the attribute 'XEN' right behind the text 'C:MagicWB-Demon' leaving a space before and after this attribute. Save your startup-sequence. Now you can enjoy the trailer whenever you boot your system, but beware: The effect of this trailer will wear off when you see it too often, so better let it appear randomly for a greater enjoyment.

In the s: directory you will find a file that is called mti.data (88kB). All graphics, animations and surround sounds are located in this little file, believe it or not! The MagicWB demon randomly decides to load the data in this file in order to run the trailer (this happens very rarely to increase the surprise effect). If the MagicWB demon can not find this file it will continue without playing the trailer. So, just rename this file and that random trailer will never come up again. Do not delete that file because it will be used in future applications as a shared resource (like a library)! Just rename it.