Wednesday, April 21, 2004, 01:55 pm

Apple seeds developers with Mac OS X 10.3.4

By Katie Marsal

Apple yesterday seeded its developers with the first external build of Mac OS X 10.3.4, which carries build number 7H41 and weighs in at approximately 33.6 MB.

In the seed notes accompanying the build, Apple said that the update includes a fix that may result in a performance gain in launching applications that aren't prebound, and asked that developers test their applications to make sure that they still launch properly.

The system update will also include changes that may impact devices such as SCSI drives, USB Flash Media, TWAIN scanners, iPods & some PC Cards, sources said. Audio FireWire devices and iPod connections over USB 2.0 may also be affected.

Meanwhile, additional areas of change are said to include Core OS, Graphics, OpenGL, Core Audio and the Mac OS X High Level Toolbox.

Apple also noted a short list of known issues with the current build that pertain to Safari table rendering, redraw issues with the Mac OS X Dock application, System Profiler crashes, and inconsistent display resolutions between logins. Additionally, the company reportedly told developers that Quartz Extreme may be disabled on certain machines, causing potential problems with DVD playback.

The last official release of Mac OS X was version 10.3.3, which made its debut last month.