MUI (Magic User Interface)
More info
- Creator
- Stefan Stuntz
- Released
- 1992
- Type
- GUI toolkit for AmigaOS
- License
- Shareware
The Amiga's object-oriented GUI toolkit from 1992, in which the program says what it wants to show and the user decides what it looks like.
Stefan Stuntz wrote Magic User Interface as shareware for AmigaOS 2.0 and up, built on the system's BOOPSI classes on top of Intuition. A program assembles its window as a tree of objects, groups containing buttons, lists and text fields, and leaves placement and sizing to MUI, which works out the layout from the window's dimensions and the font. That was news on a platform where most programs had pixel coordinates hard-coded for one particular screen resolution, and it made windows resizable as a side effect.
The other move was that appearance belonged to the user. In MUI's preferences program you chose frames, background patterns, fonts and button images once, and every MUI program then looked that way. An Amiga desktop in the mid-1990s therefore looked like its owner rather than like its programs. The user base was large enough for AmIRC, the mail client YAM and the IBrowse browser all to be built on it. MUI is the standard toolkit of MorphOS today, and AROS has a free reimplementation called Zune.