Contact:Marco Scheurer
marco@sente.epfl.ch

FLASH: SpiderWoman HAS ESCAPED! Beta testers urgently sought.

Wednesday, November 30th, Lausanne, Switzerland.

This just in from Lausanne:
A group of software developers reported this morning that SpiderWoman,
a World Wide Web client undergoing tests in their laborarory, escaped during
the night of Tuesday, November 29th. SpiderWoman was last seen at

ftp://sente.epfl.ch/pub/software/SpiderWoman.app.tar.gz

making steady   progress into the World Wide Web.  Witnesses described
the client in question   as having "anchors which are represented
by icons. Links are made through a   simple drag-and-drop-interface.
SpiderWoman, if not stopped, could extend   NEXTSTEP's Workspace
Manager to the entire World Wide Web!"

What does this mean for Web users? They will be shocked at how quickly
documents are displayed. SpiderWoman allows users to view multiple documents at
once. Requests are processed in a separate thread, so a user can add requests
while others are being processed.


SpiderWoman will prove difficult to capture. This client's dynamically
loaded tools and views of the Web include HTML, a browser, and Hypertext views.
In addition, SpiderWoman offers Librarian and open URL services, choices of
style sheets, and a Workspace-like interface. SpiderWoman's creators suspect
that, under the circumstances, users might hesitate to report SpiderWoman
sightings (although several anonymous callers claim to have seen SpiderWoman
with Elvis): "Maybe there are people out there who don't want a fast and easy
means of using the World Wide Web. If so, we haven't met them."


Volunteer beta testers are urgently needed to help track SpiderWoman.
The 10 best beta testers will receive free commemorative T-shirts. Contact
swoman@sente.epfl.ch if you would like to volunteer. This version is a beta
release and requires NEXTSTEP 3.2 or greater together with EOF 1.0; it is
triple fat (NeXT, Intel, HPPA).

SpiderWoman was developed by Sen:te in collaboration with the
Laboratoire d'Informatique Theorique de l'EPFL. Sen:te is a consulting and
development company specializing in object-oriented enterprise information
systems. EPFL is the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. For further information on Sen:te,
please see our World Wide Web page at

http://sente.epfl.ch/

or send email to   info@sente.epfl.ch. For more information about
EPFL, please point to

http://www.epfl.ch/.

NEXTSTEP, EOF, Workspace Manager are trademarks of NeXT, Inc