Katie MarsalPeople familiar with the updates to the two in-development releases say the Snow Leopard seed, 10A394, officially provides just compatibility, reliability and security fixes but appears to give developers access to Expose's integration with the Dock.
As demonstrated by Apple executive Phil Schiller earlier this month, the feature lets users click and hold on an app's Dock icon to show the windows relating to that app in equal-sized, organized tiles. The simple change makes it much easier to find a particular window for a project, for example, without having to invoke a specific Expose shortcut. They can also choose to view a selected window at full size to determine if the content inside is what they want.
It's also said that a new Xcode 3.2 build has been released in tandem with the Snow Leopard build.
Those aware of the new seed for 10.5.8 claim that it's now advanced four builds from its previous state, to 9L20. The company appears to be quickly winding up development as it supposedly hasn't mentioned any remaining known bugs and has fixed just a few prior issues, such as problems with using auto-complete on CalDAV servers in iCal, Image Capture's support for large files, and syncing Address Book with MobileMe.
The Mac maker now seems to be asking developers to focus their testing on low-level components like graphics drivers, power management and storage.
Recently, AppleInsider learned that Apple is giving interim Leopard patches nicknames based on ancient gods and refers to 10.5.8 as Loki, though those in the know say Apple hasn't mentioned the name to developers.
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58 Comments
PLEASE get 10.5.8 done and dusted asap! these bluetooth connection lost issues are killing me!
The new SL seed is quite nice, indeed. While I think the overall system performance has improved I can’t be certain, but I can tell that Exposé has gotten a lot more useful... and I don’t mean just the in-app Exposé feature.
The speed in which Exposé executes is faster and the way it groups windows is incredibly more intelligent than before. No longer will a smaller window be scaled down to a point which makes it impossible to read. Now all the windows will smaller or larger to allow for a more organized look.
Also, the text is now at the bottom of each window and a bright blue border appears with a mouse-over. As you can see in the picture minimized windows will appear as large thumbnails under non-minimized windows. If you look closely you can see a very subtle line dividing the active windows from the minimized windows.
It is indeed very nice, Solipsism.
I haven't downloaded yet. Will do so when I get a persistent internet connection for my MacBook Pro.
Looking forward to the changes, and am glad to see its at a later bug-fixing stage. It seems they were just consolidating Dock Exposé before they released it to the general developer community.
Overall, I'm quite impressed with Snow Leopard.
PLEASE get 10.5.8 done and dusted asap! these bluetooth connection lost issues are killing me!
Which issues are these? What's losing connection?
Did you apply the bluetooth firmware update?
Too bad Snow Leopard isn't coming out till September. Sounds like it is ready now. I'd be a beta tester if they allow non-ADC users to download and install it.