14 DAY TRIAL // A few weeks ago, rumors were saying that the Cupertino-based company may launch its latest operating system as early as March, as work was wrapping up faster than expected.
There's about one percent chance this will happen, if we were to evaluate Leopard's latest build release.
Those who are familiar with Leopard's latest build said it's still work in progress, featuring several fresh additions, but also a lot of known issues, many of which critical. There's little, if any chance the developers team will manage to put together OS X 10.5 as early as the end of March. Apple announced its latest feline for this spring, so they've got until the end of may to wrap it up.
Apple released build 9A377a of their OS X 10.5 this week and presented developers with several mid-range features targeting various system components.
According to AppleInsider sources, the build includes additions that concern Address Book, Safari compatibility with rich text editing, updates to Sharing Preference Pane (additional options for share-points and access controls), iSync Plug-in Maker (editing Modem Script phone settings).
They said Apple delivered with the announced improvements to Spotlight, performance optimizations and more search options (I'm assuming they added the use of boolean operators in search queries).
Sadly, the known bugs are much more numerous than the added features. Words like 'frequent crashes', 'system panic', and 'graphic corruption' reportedly came up in the build's documentation.
The team at AppleInsider says there are still important issues for Leopard concerning "HD movies, hanging webpages in Safari, adding shared folders, disabling Bluetooth sharing, screen sharing, system backups, iCal data migration, photo snapshots during set up, and dragging files from network volumes and disk images to their local machine."
The documentation also warned that the privacy option in Spotlight Preference Pane is not functional and that videos from iTunes Store can't be played in iTunes.
Build 9A377a seems nowhere near a public release of Leopard. There's still much work to be done, to say the least. I hope they don't pull another "Apple TV" and delay the launch beyond May.