Briefly: Hazmat scare at Apple; Mac OS X 10.5.7; iPhone 3.0 beta 5

A building on Apple's Cupertino campus was evacuated Wednesday when an envelope containing a suspicious white powder was discovered. Meanwhile, the company has pushed out new betas of Mac OS X 10.5.7, iTunes 8.2, and iPhone Software 3.0.

Apple hazmat scare

The Santa Clara County fire department arrived at Apple's Building 4 on De Anza Boulevard at about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday dressed in hazmat gear after they were called to the scene following the discovery of a suspicious envelope, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

An employee reportedly found the envelope, which contained an unknown white powder, in the Apple cafeteria. Preliminary test turned up no signs that the substance was hazardous but it was taken to a Santa Clara County lab for further evaluation.

Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update

Apple on Monday began distributing Mac OS X 10.5.7 build 9J60 on its internal network and subsequently made the pre-release software available for broader testing on Tuesday.

This sixtieth build of the Leopard operating system update corrected just one additional issue with a programming method that lets developers import the contents of a URL to their applications. Again, the lone issue with the software is incompatibility with the current public beta of Safari 4.0.

Mac OS X 10.5.7 includes well over 100 bug fixes, and AppleInsider has also recently learned that it will address issues with certain prior-generation Mac Pros and the ATI Radeon 4870 graphics card required for compatibility with Apple's new 24-inch LED Cinema Display.

Reportedly, the company prematurely marketed this graphics card to certain Mac Pro owners before appropriate software support was ready, which caused issues with iPhoto, VMWare Fusion, and putting the systems to sleep. Apple support representatives have apologized to affected customers and informed them that Mac OS X 10.5.7 will address the issue.

These support representatives further informed these customers last Friday that Mac OS X 10.5.7 would arrive "very shortly" or "within about a week."

iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5

Meanwhile, Apple on Wednesday evening released to iPhone developers iPhone Software 3.0 beta 5 build 7A312g, which was accompanied by iPhone SDK beta 5 build 9M2735 and iTunes 8.2 beta 10.

No major changes have turned up in any of the new betas, though a person familiar with beta 5 of iPhone Software 3.0 says the option to turn MMS messaging on or off — which never worked to begin with — is disabled in the distribution and that the tethering solution detailed on some iPhone hacking blogs no longer works.

Xsan

Apple also recently issued build 9M1041 of its Xsan networked file system. The release focuses on compatibility with the upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.