Apple Seeds Build 6F15 of Mac OS X 10.2.2

Last Thursday, Apple seeded developers with the 4th external build of Mac OS X v10.2.2. The update is code-named "Merlot" and provides stability improvements and updates to Mac OS X's Address Book, Launch Services, AppleEvents, File Manager, and Mail services. Core Audio and Graphics advancements have also been implemented in the release, along with updates to the Mac OS X kernel, FireWire and QuickDraw.

According to sources, the current (6F15) build appears to be one of the last in the development cycle of Mac OS X v10.2.2, which should be finalized and posted to Apple's automatic update servers by early next week. Apple typically only externally seeds a percentage of their operating system builds. Last week Apple seeded developers with builds 6F14 and 6F15, successively — a practice that is common at the tail-end of Apple's software development cycles.

Meanwhile, Apple's core Mac OS X development team is hard at work on the next major upgrade to Mac OS X 10, code-named "Panther." Panther was originally deemed "Pinot" by the development team, to conform to the recent trend of code-naming Mac OS X updates after wines, during their development process. The "Pinot" code-name was later changed to "Panther" to bode with Apple Marketing's scheme of publically naming major Mac OS X releases after fast cats.

Mac OS X 10.0 and Mac OS X 10.1 were code-named "Cheetah" and "Puma," respectively. On the server side, Mac OS X 10.2 Server was commonly referred to as "Tigger."