Intuition (Amiga)

Intuition (Amiga)

Intuition is the windowing system and user interface (UI) engine of AmigaOS. It was developed almost entirely by RJ Mical. Intuition should not be confused with Workbench, the AmigaOS spatial file manager, which relies on Intuition for handling windows and input events.

Users may remember the initial releases for their garish blue/orange/white/black palettes. This was intentional: in a time before cheap high-quality video monitors, the Amiga team tested output on the worst televisions they could find, with the goal of obtaining the best possible contrast under these worst-case conditions.

Intuition is the internal widget and graphics system. It is not implemented primarily as an application-managed graphics library (as most systems, following Xerox' design, have done), but rather as a separate task that maintains the state of all the standard UI elements independently from the application. This makes it singularly responsive because UI gadgets are live even when the application is busy. The Intuition task is driven by user events through the mouse, keyboard, and other input devices. It also arbitrates collisions of the mouse pointer and icons and control of "animated icons".

Due to a mistake made by the Commodore sales department, the first floppies of AmigaOS which were released with Amiga 1000 named the whole operating system (OS) "Workbench". Since then, users and CBM itself referred to "Workbench" as the nickname for the whole AmigaOS (including Amiga DOS, Extras, etc.). This common consent ended with release of version 2.0 of AmigaOS, which re-introduced proper names to the installation floppies of AmigaDOS, Workbench, Extras, etc.). Workbench is also used on the Amiga as a metaphor for their own standard of "desktop" as opposed to others, such as "Macintosh Finder". Like Finder on MacOS, Workbench itself is another library or process.

Early versions of AmigaOS did treat the Workbench as just another window on top of a blank screen; but this is due to the ability of AmigaOS to have invisible screens with a chromakey or a genlock, even without losing the visibility of Workbench itself. In later AmigaOS versions Workbench could be set as a borderless desktop.

Amiga users were also able to boot their computer into a command line interface (CLI), also known as shell. This was a keyboard-based environment without the Workbench GUI. Later they could invoke it with the CLI/SHELL command LoadWB which performs the task to load Workbench GUI.

Like most GUIs of the day, Amiga's Intuition followed Xerox's lead anteceding solutions, but pragmatically, a command line interface was also included and it extended the functionality of the platform. Later releases added more improvements, like support for high-color Workbench screens and 3D aspect. Replacement desktops were also made available, such as Directory Opus Magellan, or Scalos interface.