Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard New Build Released

An extremely limited series of pre-release builds of Leopard was released this week by Apple Computer to developers - Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard build 9A303.

In mid-October, Apple released its first pre-release update of the future version of Mac OS X that was called 9A283. This version delivered "Significant user interface changes to iCal" and "Basic editing in Preview," according to the report. It also adds "new Parental Controls [...] for content filtering, apps, and curfews" and "3D audio cues to indicate locations of items

on the screen in the VoiceOver screen reader," as AppleInsider reported then.

In addition to all the changes and new additions, like every pre-released build, 9A283 had some problems. Issues like Safari's bug reporting feature, as well as glitches that have been impeding the use of Timbuktu and Eudora due to crashes at launch.
This new build has resolved all of these problems and some more like the hangs in Finder. These hangs were caused by a network connectivity issue and the new 9A303 build also delivers several performance enhancements to the initial version of Time Machine.

The new build's primary objective, among others, is to resolve several "performance related bugs" that were present in build 9A283, AppleInsider reports.

All-in-all, this new version still has flaws, as Apple continues to list more than a dozen issues that they are familiar with and appear in Leopard. These issues include file and QuickTime errors in iChat, iDisk synching failures and printing issues with HP raster printers.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard build 9A303 also contains problems where items deleted in the trash may not disappear until a restart, Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros won't recognize their AirPort cards, and logins initially fail after enabling FileVault protection on an account.

Apple has maintained that it will be ready to release Leopard sometime during the first half of 2007, AppleInsider writes.



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