Apple's developers have been seeded with a new Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard build (10a222). The pre-release version of the OS includes additions to Grand Central, with Apple requesting testers to focus on Microsoft Exchange support in particular.

The seed notes for this build also reveal that the MacBook Pro (Late 2008) [MacBook Pro 5,1] is not currently supported for 64-bit kernel development. Seed notes (excerpt), courtesy of World of Apple, can be found below.

Areas To Focus On

Microsoft Exchange Support

Setting Up Exchange

Mail includes an autodiscovery feature to streamline the configuration process:

1. Open Mail preferences and click the plus button to add a new account;

2. Enter your Microsoft Exchange email address and password and click “Continue;”*

3. Your server settings will be auto populated, and you can choose to simultaneously configure Exchange for Address Book and iCal as well;

4. Verify the settings are correct and click “Create.”

If your server settings are not automatically configured, after step 2 you can select “Microsoft Exchange 2007” as a new account type, and manually enter your server settings.

Mail

Messages moved from a different account to Exchange no longer have content replaced with “=” characters;

Working offline is supported;

Most Exchange*administrative*messages should now be visible;

Undo should work as expected.

iCal

You can now send and receive meeting invitations;

Calendars can now be created on Exchange accounts.

Address Book

Searching and importing from the global address list is now supported (only single-term searches are expected to work at this time);

Offline editing of Exchange contacts or folders is supported;

Address Book will now sync with contact or folders deletions done via another Exchange client;

Creating an Exchange 2007 account from Address Book should properly set up the account in Mail;

You can now edit assistant, spouse, birthday, anniversary fields for Exchange contacts.


Known Limitations in Microsoft Exchange Support

Mail

Redo is not fully supported;

Canceling*operations doesn’t always work as expected.

Address Book

Editing existing contacts doesn’t always work as expected;

Undo/redo is not fully supported;

Displaying and editing photos for Exchange contacts is not fully supported;

Error messages may be unhelpful or non-existent. *e.g. There is no warning if you enter the incorrect password.


Multicore

Grand Central

Dispatch Group [New]

A Dispatch Group API has been introduced, allowing applications to group multiple Blocks together and wait for their completion, or receive an asynchronous notification of their completion.

According to an AppleInsider report, there has been evidence to suggest that Snow Leopard could reach the end-user months ahead of expectations. However, the seed notes for build 10a222 sadly reveal that Apple still needs to beef up Snow Leopard for good performance, particularly on notebooks.