Item    4788614                 93/11/01        05:33
From:   CONRAD_GEIGER@NEXT.COM@INTERNET#
Subject: Announcing Foundation Classes from Lighthouse: Make Possible Reusable
ObjectWare

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For more information, contact
Wiley Hodges
Lighthouse Design
415/570-7736


Lighthouse Design Ships Foundation Classes 2.1
Extends NEXTSTEP Product Reach with Reusable ObjectWare.

SAN MATEO, Calif., October 31, 1993 - Lighthouse Design, Ltd. today
shipped its Foundation Classes, a library of reuseable Objective-C
classes designed to complement NEXTSTEP's ApplicationKit. The
Foundation Classes provide NEXTSTEP developers with a suite of
proven software components to accelerate development of mission
critical applications, while serving as a solid cornerstone for
in-house object repositories.

"The Foundation Classes made the development of our Pencil Me In
scheduling software much easier," said Andrew K. Turk, president of
Sarrus Software, Inc. "Because the Foundation Classes had already
been thoroughly tested, we could reuse the code in our own
development, saving Sarrus time and money. But the real leverage we
got was the freedom to focus on solving customers' enterprise
scheduling problems rather than on reinventing the wheel."

The Foundation Classes provide NEXTSTEP developers with a basic
suite of object oriented building blocks on which to base their own
application development. The library includes components to handle
character strings, flexible collections like lists, sets, stacks
and queues, along with separate classes to automate error handling
and reporting. Together, these components are found at the heart of
most business and technical applications.

"The Foundation Classes are an integral part of Lighthouse's
NEXTSTEP development," said Kevin Steele, Lighthouse Design's
director of engineering. "The Foundation Classes are at the core of
our shrink-wrapped productivity applications, so commercializing
this technology offers the same quality and time-savings to our
customers as our engineers are able to achieve internally."

The Foundation Classes provide unparalleled convenience and
security to NEXTSTEP developers. The Classes were used throughout
the development of Diagram!, an information graphics program,
Concurrence, a multi-media presentation program, and Lighthouse
Design's newest TaskMaster project management application. As a
result of such heavy usage on tens of thousands of customer
desktops, the Foundation Classes are among the safest and most
widely-deployed ObjectWare available for any platform.

To developers transitioning from mainframes or Microsoft Windows to
object oriented development, the Foundation Classes provide a
thoroughly tested and documented foundation on which to base
in-house object repositories. As developers continue and expand
their development, such an internal object repository provides a
library from which code can be safely reused. True reusability of
software components is one of the primary benefits of
object-oriented development, and the NEXTSTEP environment.

"The commercial release of The Foundation Classes represents a
significant extension of our product line and commitment to the
NEXTSTEP environment," said Jonathan Schwartz, president of
Lighthouse Design. "Demand for NEXTSTEP on the Intel
x86 platform has been consistently growing. By moving into the
technical arena with The Foundation Classes and future applications
geared toward corporate developers, we intend to provide
high-quality Lighthouse Design products from develop
ment through deployment."


NeXT develops and markets the award-winning NEXTSTEP
object-oriented software for industry-standard computer
architectures. Customers use NEXTSTEP to develop and deploy custom
client/server applications, using both custom and shrink-wrapped
software. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, and with
offices throughout the world, NeXT serves customers requiring
enterprise-wide, object-oriented productivity environments.

Lighthouse Design is a privately-held software firm based in San
Mateo, California, dedicated since 1989 to providing innovative and
useful productivity applications for object-oriented environments.
Other NEXTSTEP products from Lighthouse Design include Concurrence,
an outlining and presentation product; Diagram!, an innovative
drawing program; and TaskMaster, a comprehensive project management
application.


-30-

Lighthouse Design, Diagram!, Concurrence, TaskMaster, and
Lighthouse Design's Foundation Classes are trademarks of Lighthouse
Design, Ltd. NEXTSTEP is a registered trademark of NeXT Computer,
Inc. AppKit and ObjectWare are trademarks of NeXT Computer, Inc.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.




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