Is Latest Leopard Build a Sign of Trouble?

Apple’s recent press statement blamed the Leopard delay on the work being done on the iPhone, however, a look at the latest developer build of Leopard shows a surprising number of issues that keep popping up. Bearing in mind that there are still a number of Top Secret features that nobody outside Cupertino has been made privy to yet, the list of actual bugs and issues in the upcoming version of the operating system could be much bigger.

The latest Leopard (Client) Build 9A410, released to thousands of Mac OS X developers this week, has a list of nearly three dozen known issues. These issues are varied, with the most critical ones affecting the system's installation process, Apple's QuickTime digital media software, and causing graphics corruption with some graphics hardware.
Of the less important problems, there is a host of printing bugs and glitches in updated versions of the Mac maker's iChat video conference software and PhotoBooth applications. The list continues into approximately 20 "Miscellaneous" bugs spans across a broad range system components, including iCal, iTunes, Safari, Mail and FileVault.

The first impressions are that, unlike the previous seeds, the latest 5.3-gigabyte Leopard build contains only a handful of notable changes, most pertaining to updates to the software's various underlying frameworks. The one application that seems to be getting a lot of attention is the Terminal, however, the changes to it seem to include mostly subtle modifications to the software's window settings.
Whether development on Leopard is progressing slowly, or most of what is being done is on the Top Secret features that do not make it to the outside world is hard to say. However, if the situation on what can bee seen is anything to go by, there is a distinct possibility that there might be a lot of problems with the hidden features as well.

Apple last seeded a pre-release version of Leopard to developers in early March, when it released Mac OS X Leopard (Client) Build 9A377a.

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