Apple's developer community has recently received new test builds for the company's upcoming 10.5.6 security and maintenance update to Leopard, as well as for 10.6, AKA Snow Leopard. We've already covered Mac OS X 10.6 build 10A222, meaning 10.5.6 build 9G52 is the beta in line for disclosing.

The latest Mac OS X 10.5.6 beta build asks developers to focus on the MobileMe service, stressing that testers should particularly look out for syncing issues. In what is probably a good indication that 10.5.6 is to be released soon, the current testing build of 10.5.6 includes no known issues. Moving past the installation instructions, the seed notes for Mac OS X 10.5.6 build 9G52 include the following Focus Areas with Additional Information:

MobileMe / Syncing

Please help test MobileMe automatic syncing. We are particularly interested in testing automatic sync on portable computers and on networks with medium to high latency and or constrained bandwidth. Please include the ~/Library/Logs/Sync/dotmacsync.log with any radars you file.

If you are working behind a firewall (ie. corporate proxy), we would like to know your experience with the syncing. If you have auto sync turned on, and you make a change from me.com, or MobileMe website, does that change sync within a reasonable amount of time?  Also attempt general syncing of Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks and other sync data. Please watch for excessive syncing and file radars for any abnormal syncs.

Mail

We would appreciate testing from those who send messages entirely in non Latin character sets, such as Hangul, Kotoeri, Traditional Chinese character sets.  We would also like to include those who send messages and enclosures in Latin character sets (French, German, Italian, etc). Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic would be another good set of writing systems to pound on.  Testing should include attachment names, punctuation, and anywhere else the character sets appear.

The release notes for build 9G52 list a total of 103 specific bug fixes. For “Issues fixed in previous seeds,” head over to the HMBT blog, the very source leaking the seed notes for build 9G52.

As expected, Apple is working in parallel on the Server version of OS X 10.5.6 Leopard. On the Server side (build 9G46), Apple has asked developers to focus their testing efforts in areas like Podcast Producer, Password Server, Server Manager, Single Sign-On, and AFP Performance.