For Immediate Release

*-) Onyx Technology Introduces Spotlight Memory Debugger for the
Macintosh (-*

Contact:
Onyx Technology, Inc.
7811 27th Avenue West
Bradenton, FL 34209
Main: (941) 795-7801
Fax: (941) 795-5901
Sales: (941) 795-7801; sales@onyx-tech.com
Technical/Customer Support: support@onyx-tech.com
http://www.onyx-tech.com
ftp://ftp.onyx-tech.com/pub/QC/

Bradenton, FL — 04 DEC 1996: Onyx Technology, makers of the “QC(tm)”
stress testing tool, have reinforced their position as the leading memory
debugging tools vendor for the Macintosh community with the release of a
new debugging tool called “Spotlight on Macintosh”. Spotlight is easy to
use yet powerful enough to become a key component of virtually every
programmer and tester’s arsenal of tools. Spotlight contains impressive
abilities for providing memory protection services and fine granularity
memory bounds checking, toolbox API discipline checking, and leaks
detection. Spotlight requires that the developer/tester have a PowerPC
xSYM file for analysis.

Fine Grained Memory Protection

Spotlight identifies reads and writes outside of application and system
heap address spaces. Additionally, each read and write during execution
of your application code is inspected to detect faulty accesses that
occur between blocks in memory, stack and stack based objects, and in ROM.

Toolbox Validation

Spotlight checks parameters to over 400 MacOS toolbox API calls.
Automatic validation of handles, pointers, memory blocks, parameters and
return values is just the beginning. Specific tests detect subtle errors
such as drawing into unlocked GWorlds, passing invalid window pointers to
the toolbox, and passing unlocked memory handles to routines that may
move memory. Any one of these errors could take hours to debug without
Spotlight. With Spotlight they are automatically detected and logged.

Leak Detection

Spotlight identifies ‘leaks’: memory allocations that are not released.
A clear listing of leaks includes a stack trace showing the exact source
code line where the leaked item was allocated and the size and frequency
of the leak. Instantly discover all leaked MacOS objects, malloc’d and
C++ objects and undisposed of resources.

Brooks Bell, President of Onyx, on Spotlight:

“Onyx is a small company and we talk to programmers and QA testers daily.
These customers have repeatedly told us that they needed better memory
debugging tools. Spotlight’s specs are like a checklist of their most
requested features: Leak detection, trap validation, detection of all
illegal memory reads and writes… And it all works at the source code
level – most people don’t want to go mucking around in PowerPC assembler
if they don’t have to. Tools similar to Spotlight exist on other
platforms but until now Macintosh developers have not had access to them.
We’ve been using it in house for a few months now and have found that
this is one of those rare tools that will very often pay for itself the
very first time you run it.”

Ken Wieschhoff of Siren Enterprises and a Spotlight beta tester comments,
“A wonderful complement to Onyx’ current offering, QC, Spotlight has
helped me find some very subtle bugs and has dramatically improved the
quality of my software. I won’t release without either one.”

Sanford H. Selznick, another beta tester adds, “I had a very obtuse
algorithmic bug which took me almost an entire week to track down.
Spotlight found it in 15 minutes.”

Pricing for Spotlight DR1 is on an annual subscription basis that
includes free upgrades for a year. Subscription price is US$199 and is
available direct from Onyx (see contact information above). If desired,
you can acquire a PGP public key from our web site for encrypting
sensitive credit card information. All Onyx products carry a 30 day no
questions asked money back guarantee.

Onyx Technology, a recognized leader in Macintosh testing tools, supports
a wide ranging market base of customers from 39 countries that include
software engineers, testers, publishers, magazine writers and reviewers.
Based in Bradenton, FL, Onyx publishes testing and debugging tools for
the purpose of stress testing Macintosh applications. These tools help
thousands of developers and testers produce more reliable software and
have indirectly help millions of end users who enjoy the increased
stability of Macintosh software tested with Onyx products. Companies
using Onyx products include Adobe, America Online, Apple, Claris, Kodak,
Linotype Hell, Microsoft, Motorola, NASA, Netscape Communications,
Novell, Symantec, US West and thousands of others.