Apple's second beta of Mac OS X 10.6.7 focuses on Mac App Store [u]
People familiar with the software say it is known as build 10J846, and the delta update is a 372MB download. Apple has reportedly asked developers to concentrate on the new Mac App Store, as well as previous focus areas of AirPort, Bonjour, SMB and Graphics Drivers.
The latest build comes just days after the first was issued to developers last Thursday. The previous build, 10J842, was a 338.6MB download in its delta form.
As with the previous update, there are said to be no known issues with the pre-release build of Mac OS X 10.6.7.
Also issued Tuesday was a new beta of Mac OS X 10.6.7 Server. The 468.3MB delta update is said to include one known issue, in which clients may fail to NetBoot from NetRestore image of 10.6.6 created with Mac OS X Server 10.6.6.
The current version of Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6.6, was released to the public earlier this month. It included the Mac App Store, a new digital storefront where users can quickly and easily download applications for their Mac.
Further updates to Snow Leopard are likely few, as Apple is hard at work on its next version of the Mac operating system, dubbed Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Lion will add features from iOS like home screens, full-screen applications and auto-saving, and is expected to be released this summer.
Update: a reader has reported that, new to Mac OS X 10.6.7, "both the standard version and the server version are being posted by Apple simultaneously and with the same build date. This differs from past betas of Mac OS X, going back years, when the server version was not available until at least a day after the standard version. This suggests the build process has been streamlined (which is particularly important for addressing security concerns in a timely manner)."
18 Comments
I am not terribly excited for lion right now. When I need to launch an app I just press command spacebar. type three letters and hit enter. Otherwise it's on the dock. Space Ship is a good feature, but expose does the job for me quite nicely, and I don't have a magic mouse to make full use of the features anyway. I don't have the mouse because it is not a good fit for my hand, is a bit too low to be usable. App store is already out on Snow Leopard.
One thing I liked was full screen apps, I found with Word 2011 and iWork Pages it is sometimes very useful to put apps into full screen to help focus and concentrate on the task at hand.
I was way more excited about snow leopard with speed improvements, open CL, grand central, being able to drill down folders in the dock. But we will see how I will feel closer to release.
They better fix the blunder they did with Finder in 10.6.6. Finder now crashes when quickviewing certain image formats (Nikon RAW files, TIFF files sometimes). Also, the cmd+tab app switcher sometimes doesn't show up even though it's registered the keypresses so it actually does switch apps - and even those times it does show up it frequently leaves out the icon for one or two open apps (if I'm lucky they appear on attempt two). There also seem to be some HD-access issues, 'cause several apps, especially Adobe Bridge and Photoshop sometimes fail to save or read a file on the first attempt, but thankfully succeed on the second. There's also an issue that's either affecting Photoshop or the Topaz plugins, or both, that prevent me from running batch jobs without sitting at the computer moving the mouse (currently in a dialoge with someone at Adobe regarding this, and he said Apple managed to introduce some API changes in 10.6.6, obviously without telling developers about it). Chrome has also started freezing once in a while on 10.6.6.
Overall, they have some cleaning up to do...
Can we have an AI post on how the hell they're going to get a 10.7 release out by Sept 21st - 9 months away, if we haven't seen a developer build released out yet?
Is there an inner circle of developers who have seen one, but aren't talking? Or is Apple keeping this very close to their chest.
What we've seen so far, is basically bringing iOS concepts to OS 10.6 - is that what Lion will actually be about - a release dedicated to a grand merging of the two, in a much bigger way than previously (with the effect of changing and updating OS X?).
If there isn't a dev build till WWDC - that's only what, 2-3 months maximum that they have till they've stated it's going Gold Master?!
Snow Leopard was billed as an update to 10.5, whereas Lion is released as a fully packed update (i'm not dissing 10.6 - I think it actually held a hell of a lot of changes, but many were beneath the surface.
So what gives?
Bah - nobody here cares about what's going on... As long as their stock is safe.
Can we have an AI post on how the hell they're going to get a 10.7 release out by Sept 21st - 9 months away, if we haven't seen a developer build released out yet?
Is there an inner circle of developers who have seen one, but aren't talking? Or is Apple keeping this very close to their chest.
What we've seen so far, is basically bringing iOS concepts to OS 10.6 - is that what Lion will actually be about - a release dedicated to a grand merging of the two, in a much bigger way than previously (with the effect of changing and updating OS X?).
If there isn't a dev build till WWDC - that's only what, 2-3 months maximum that they have till they've stated it's going Gold Master?!
Snow Leopard was billed as an update to 10.5, whereas Lion is released as a fully packed update (i'm not dissing 10.6 - I think it actually held a hell of a lot of changes, but many were beneath the surface.
So what gives?
I think what weÂ?ve seen are mainly visual changes, not massive rewrites to the underpinnings like they did when moving from Leopard to Snow Leopard. If this is mainly a Â?look and feelÂ? update then I think they can have less developer input than only focusing on the backend or focusing on the entire OS like they did before Snow Leopard.
Jobs stated years ago that Mac OS X updates will slow down as the platform matures. I wonder if the tik-tik method (Ã* la Intel) alternating focus on the backend and front-end is what they are doing.