Apple Seeds Mac OS 9.0 Beta 5, Squashes Bugs

On July 30th, Apple seeded developers with an "Emergency Release" of Mac OS 9.0, code named Sonata, that extinguished some nasty stability issues we noted in our previous report.

"We've discovered a serious crashing bug with the notification manager in the b4c3 release of Sonata," Time Holmes, Mac OS Technology Manager, told developers. The update, Mac OS 9.0 b4c4, consisted only of revised System and System Resources files and quickly cleared up the crashing issue.

The update was accompanied by a new iMac Firmware Update. Likewise, the controversial Yosemite Power Macintosh Firmware Upgrade was also seeded with the Emergency Fix.

Mac OS 9.0 Beta 5

This past Friday, Apple proceeded with their official beta test, seeding developers with beta 5 of Sonata. According to sources, beta 5 will be the last of two releases before the system officially hits the Final Candidate stage.

At this time in the development process, Apple has told developers to work under the assumption that any outstanding incompatibility issues may remain in the shipping version of Mac OS 9.0. The remainder of the work to be done on Sonata will be to fix system bugs, sources said.

Some other notes of interest are: Open Transport has been reduced from 6 to 2 libraries, and a brand new set of platinum sounds have been added, not that many of us use them. "I don't know about you, but when I move a window I don't want to hear a sound that I can only describe as a high pitched jackhammer," one source said.

Apple has also radically altered the "About this Macintosh" box by implementing a Mac OS 9 banner, as opposed to a smaller image. One cool thing to note is that when clicked on, the banner will launch the users favorite web browser and take them to Apple's Mac OS Homepage. In addition, the Finder easter-egg, which displays a list of engineering credits, now sports a view of the Apple Campus rather than Silicon Valley.

"We expect Mac OS 9 to be a great success and expect that this success will benefit not only our users, but you the developers," Apple told Mac OS developers. Mac OS 9.0 should go into the CD production process in early October and hit retail stores and mail order catalogs in the second or third week in the month.

Oh, and the Special Menu has returned to being "Special" :)

As always, a whole wealth of information, and complete feature list can be seen in our Mac OS 9.0 Information Archive.