From: Chad Hill/Len Fernandes                                William Tseng
      Hill Communications                                    Confluent, Inc.
      510-945-7910 or 510-538-8916                           415-764-1000 

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (June 17, 1994) -- A multipurpose, conceptual drawing tool targeted at applications as diverse as software design, business graphics, training, and technical documentation will be shipped in the third quarter by start-up Confluent, Inc.

Visual Thought, developed to help business, technical, engineering, and general users communicate ideas graphically, uses object-oriented technology to create and edit diagrams -- drawings that communicate information about relationships between things.

Unlike conventional illustration or drafting tools, Visual Thought was designed from inception to get ideas onto the screen graphically. A key feature is its ability to draw shapes and make rubberbanding connections between objects. Typical uses of this basic capability are presentation graphics, flowcharts, network diagrams, and software diagrams.

Visual Thought's emphasis on ease-of-use positions it as a productivity tool. Users can drag-and-drop objects from the library of application-specific, free-form, editable palettes, or they can create their own palettes. The Inspector dialog speeds the examination and editing of objects by acting as a 5-in-1 dialog and also by eliminating the need for "OK" and "Apply" buttons. True WYSIWYG capabilities show users exactly what they are doing, even while dragging objects. One hundred levels of multiple undo and redo make it easy to recover from mistakes [and to play "what-if" games with drawings]. Applications

Business users can drag-and-drop objects from the predefined palettes or open application-specific templates to create a variety of presentation graphics, including organizational charts, flowcharts, and network diagrams.

Software developers can create diagrams for analysis and design with Visual Thought's support for popular software diagramming methodologies, such as Booch, Rumbaugh (OMT), and Entity-Relationship. The editable drag-and-drop palettes also allow developers to capture and deploy their own methodologies.

Writers and programmers can use the large collection of multi-purpose shapes and rubberbanding connections in combination with the intuitive editing facilities to quickly create figures and diagrams as Encapsulated PostScript for import into document processors like FrameMaker.

Training and support personnel can use the attachment mechanism to link arbitrary files and programs to objects. These files can be Visual Thought documents, making it easy to create hierarchical training courses that can be administered unattended. Multimedia extensions allow annotation of documents with sound and images.

Other applications include the ability to draw dataflow and process diagrams, and circuit and logic diagrams.

Confluent was incorporated in July, 1993 by William Tseng and James A. Greenfield to address the lack of powerful, accessible drawing tools in the UNIX marketplace. Because such tools can best be created by building on a platform-independent, object-oriented infrastructure with strong support for high-performance graphics, Visual Thought was developed with the Galaxy Application Environment from Visix Software, based in Reston, Virginia.

Visual Thought will initially be available on Sun SPARCstations and compatibles running SunOS 4.1.3 with OpenWindows 3. Versions that support Solaris 2.x, HP PA-RISC workstations running HP-UX, and IBM RS/6000 workstations running AIX will ship later this year.

System requirements are 16MB of RAM, 32MB of swap space, and a color or gray-scale monitor. A microphone for recording and editing sounds is recommended.

Suggested retail is $995 for a floating license and $595 for a node-locked license, with educational and quantity discounts available.

Confluent can be reached at 415-586-8700, fax 415-586-8838. The Internet electronic mail address is info@confluent.com.

Confluent, Inc. * 400 Spear Street, Suite 207 * San Francisco, CA 94105
800-780-2838 and 415-764-1000 tel * 415-764-1008 fax * info@confluent.com

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