Apple Alters Mac OS X in Latest Builds

Apple has been pumping out at least a couple of builds of their next-generation Mac OS X operating system each day, as of late. The company will apparently continue to do so for the next two weeks, at which time the operating system is expected to go golden master and be frozen for release.

The late development process hasn't gone without error, however. According to sources, the Mac OS X development team seeded Mac OS X builds 4K47 and 4K48 internally last Saturday, after Friday's build of the OS (4K46) was said to have fried one of the company's 533MHz multiprocessor Power Mac G4 test machines. It is currently unknown whether the Power Mac was a finalized unit or a prototype that the company had kept on-hand for testing purposes.

In healthier news, Apple has been succeeding at increasing the speed of the OS with successive build. Sources who've been testing builds on a regular basis have noticed substantial speed increases when running some of the latest builds. "Build 4K29 showed noticeable speed and stability improvements over build 4K17, running on a 400MHz Apple PowerBook G3," one source said. But as of build 4K29, the OS would still refuse to boot on a Power Mac G4 400 that contained an SCSI PCI card. Upon removing the card, the OS is rumored to have booted beautifully.

In related news, Apple continues to alter the component set of Mac OS X, even in the month of February. According to sources, as of build 4k17, the company no longer is including the Music Player application, possibly in favor of a Mac OS X flavored iTunes.

As of build 4K41, the Apple Sherlock application no longer sports a find-file function, sources said. Instead, the company is testing a separate application that instantaneously finds a file, without the time drawback of loading all of Sherlock's code into memory. Meanwhile, the altered Sherlock application in build 4K41 is said to sport a new look the places a fancy new toolbar in place of the large buttons previously found at the top of the application.

Additionally, certain builds of Mac OS X beyond build 4K16 have been rumored to sport a number of unreleased industrial applications such as Roxio Toast 5.0 and Internet Explorer 5.5.

As always, stay tuned to AppleInsider for further information on Mac OS X.