14 DAY TRIAL // Developers and regular customers alike this week received new software from Cupertino, California. As usual, this article offers a lowdown of the important downloads from Apple Inc. for the week ending February 9.
The first and most important update of the week came on February 4.
iOS 7.1 Build 11D5145e is the fifth developer beta in the iOS 7.1 development cycle, and features a small Shift/Caps keyboard tweak, and fresh natural-sounding Siri voices for Australian English, UK English, Japanese, and Chinese (Mandarin).
Apple also seeded Xcode 5.1 Beta 5 and Apple TV Software Beta 5, both for application development purposes. Arm64 is now a Standard Architecture in Xcode, but the final version of Xcode 5.1 has yet to become available for general (public) consumption.
As for Apple TV Beta 5, Apple tells developers (as usual) that “This is a pre-release version of Apple TV Software to be used for testing AirPlay with your iOS apps.”
On the same day, OS X Server 3.1 Preview Build 13S4090c was made available for download, also for developers. This is a beta release of OS X Server Preview for testing on OS X Mavericks 10.9.2 systems. There are some fixed bugs inside this beta, but also some issues that still need addressing. The public release may be far off still.
On February 5, Apple released Pro Apps Uncompressed 4:2:2 Codec v1.0.2, which “enables viewing of uncompressed 8-bit and 10-bit 4:2:2 video in newer video applications on OS X Mavericks.” The installer package weighs in at just a few hundred KB and it's available to the general population.
Rounding up this week’s updates was a pre-release OS X Mavericks 10.9.2 13C53, or the fifth beta in the Mavericks 10.9.2 development phase. According to the seed note, developers will continue to focus on areas like SMB2, Mail, Graphics, Messages, VoiceOver and VPN.
The succession of these Mavericks seeds has increased slightly, making it apparent that Apple is preparing to roll out the software publicly.