[marbletiles]

> AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then

Can you say more? I had (and loved) an A1200 and appreciated what things like ARexx could do, but I don't know what you're alluding to here that things like the Mac didn't ultimately implement as well (though sometimes less well; I miss multiple screens to this day)

[flohofwoe]

Back on the Amiga 3000 we had built our asset creation tools for a game that eventually ended up as Urban Assault on the PC. This was a wild mix of custom-made and standard tools wired together via AREXX and controlled with a little macOS dock like icon toolbar, and all integrated with the workbench file manager.

E.g. one such custom workflow would be to "pipe" an image file created in DPaint into some standard image processing tool (forgot the name, basically like ImageMagick, but as a UI tool) to change the pixel format, scale and filter, then piping the resulting output image into a custom tool to convert into an engine specific texture format, all the while updating some asset database files, and IIRC also creating an icon file in the process.

Most of this can also be achieved with a pure cmdline workflow today via Python or Node (by glueing together tools like ImageMagick, ffmpeg, various asset pipeline tools), but the special sauce on the Amiga was that most 'modern' UI tools adhered to standards defined by the Amiga team for cmdline usage and scripting.

The 'plugin architecture' was mostly about datatypes (globally available file format encoders/decoders), BOOPSI UI components and 'Commodities' (IIRC small background tools that could intercept and manipulate system events).

[vidarh]

> most 'modern' UI tools adhered to standards defined by the Amiga team for cmdline usage and scripting.

One minor example of the usability was that the ReadArgs() call was fairly extensively used within a year or two after it was introduced and meant that the "?" command line option for help worked "everywhere" and would give a machine parseable, semi-typed options list (annotations like "/T" for toggle, "/N" for number etc.)

[kalleboo]

Many newspapers in the 90's had their whole classified sections automated using custom AppleScript workflows, it was one of the big things that kept publishers on the Mac instead of Windows, since Microsoft didn't have anything to compete (OLE/VBA was a joke for these things)

[mosura]

Yep the whole AppleScript and (Quark Xpress) Xtension mechanism was remarkably sticky. Apple were treading dangerously during the OSX transition when it became clear much of that would never port over, but Quark was losing their grip by then.

MS were trying a huge NT push into the DTP industry that basically hit that wall and aborted.

[LocalH]

> some standard image processing tool (forgot the name, basically like ImageMagick, but as a UI tool)

Possibly Art Department Professional (aka ADPro)?