Eiffel Software Announces Beta Release of EiffelStudio for Macintosh OS X

Eiffel Software offers full IDE as a free download during beta phase

Eiffel Software announces the beta release of the latest version of its
award-winning development environment, EiffelStudio(tm), for the
Macintosh(tm) OS X(tm) platform. Available now for the first time on the
Macintosh platform, the company is offering the long-awaited version
EiffelStudio for the Mac as a free download.

"For years, the choices for Mac developers have been very limited, and
there has been tremendous interest in having a fully object-oriented
development system available for the Macintosh platform," said Chris
Ambarian, VP of Sales and Marketing at Eiffel Software. "This is a fully
functional version of EiffelStudio that works on the Mac. We still have a
little bit of work to be done on native look-and-feel aspects, but we think
it is hands-down the most sophisticated development environment available
for the Mac platform. For a limited time we're offering it for free. We're
looking to the market to give us feedback to guide final development and
ensure that it has everything that the Mac developers want."

EiffelStudio is based on the highly-regarded object-oriented programming
language, Eiffel. Case studies have shown that because of the efficiency of
the language and the powerful tools in the environment, EiffelStudio's
users are demonstrating that compared to using other popular languages and
toolsets: 1) they can produce as much as 10 times the usable software in
the same amount of time, and 2) the quality of the resulting software is
higher.

Eiffel has thus gained prominence in recent years among developers and
design team leaders in challenging enterprise environments, as well as
among independent development teams who create high-quality reusable
applications for smaller- to medium- sized companies.

The OS X version of EiffelStudio adds to the already wide range of
operating systems for which EiffelStudio is available (which includes
Windows, Linux, Unix, VMS and embedded systems). This means that a team can
build entire applications (including bulletproof business logic and
sophisticated GUIs) that will run identically on any platform for which
EiffelStudio is available.

"EiffelStudio's openness makes it a great way to create robust, reusable
objects and libraries that can run identically on a wide variety of
platforms. Its Design by Contract(tm) feature makes it especially easy to
create code that developers can safely, reliably use to create
business-critical applications, and EiffelBuild allows them to create rich,
portable GUIs that don't have to be rewritten either," says Ambarian.

"With EiffelStudio's combination of portability and reuse, plus robustness-
and productivity-related features, you have a tool that drastically cuts
development time. Most of our customers report up to 80% time savings over
other well-known languages and tools."

Features of EiffelStudio 5.3 include:

* An easy-to-learn, plain-English syntax

* An extremely powerful object model that includes Design by Contract(tm),
multiple inheritance, and genericity

* A complete framework for producing software applications that includes a
graphic modeling tool that is integrated with the implementation (code)
view for seamless roundtrip engineering, and a multi-platform GUI builder
that generates Eiffel code

* Complete portability on several different platforms (various Windows,
Unix, Linux, PPC, VMS, embedded systems, and even Mac OS X and .NET)

According to Eiffel Software, the Eiffel language is syntactically among
the easiest to learn of all programming languages. Passive support for
users new to the language is available from the company website, where
there are also links to Eiffel user groups. Onsite training and consulting
are also available from the company by inquiring at sales@eiffel.com. The
OS X beta version of EiffelStudio 5.3 is available as a free download at
www.eiffel.com/downloads/.

The new release of EiffelStudio 5.3 on other platforms has already begun
shipping to Eiffel Software's existing customers, and is available for
purchase via the company's website, www.eiffel.com. Eiffel Software (a
division of ISE) is the world leader in Eiffel true object-oriented
programming tools. Founded in 1985, Eiffel Software produces proven
professional tools and component libraries for business-critical and
enterprise software developments. Eiffel Software's products enable their
customers to output more and higher-quality software in less time than with
any other development tools available. Its users span the globe, in
industries ranging from large financial institutions, to technology
manufacturing, to government and defense contractors, to health care
providers and more.

For more information about Eiffel Studio, contact Eiffel Software at 356
Storke Road; Goleta, California 93117; (805) 685-1006; sales@eiffel.com; or
visit www.eiffel.com.