14 DAY TRIAL // Developers enrolled with Apple are being notified that a new beta of OS X Lion is now available for download with new focus areas and no known issues.
People familiar with the Lion development cycle have been handed Mac OS X 10.7.2 Build 11C57 this week. The build is obtainable from Apple's Mac Dev center.
Weighing in at 790 megabytes as a combo update and at 740 megabytes for the barebones delta update, build 11C57 asks developers to focus on areas such as AddressBook, GraphicsDrivers, iCal, iChat, iCloud, the Mac App Store, Mail, MobileMe, Spotlight, and Time Machine.
This is the second Lion build Apple has seeded to developers with focus areas that include both MobileMe, and iCloud - the upcoming suite of cloud services slated to replace MobileMe this fall.
iCloud is now a big component of Mac OS X. Last week’s Lion seed specifically asked developers to test the service thoroughly. Build 11C55 was the first to incorporate the beta version of iCloud directly.
The suite is to launch publicly this fall, as confirmed by Apple at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference.
When iCloud was introduced this summer, Apple described it as “a breakthrough set of free new cloud services that work seamlessly with applications on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices.”
The reason Apple believed iCloud needed to become a reality was because, as Steve Jobs put it, “Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices.”
“iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it—it all just works,” he said.