14 DAY TRIAL // Developers enlisted with Apple have been granted access to a fourth beta release of the seventh incremental update to Snow Leopard - Mac OS X 10.6.7 Build 10J855.
The beta reportedly asks developers to continue their focus on the Mac App Store, as well as AirPort, Bonjour, SMB, and Graphics Drivers. There are also no known issues with this build.
“Mac OS X Snow Leopard Software Update 10.6.7 build 10J855” weighs in at 412.6 MB as a barebones delta update, and precisely 1 gigabyte as a combo update, according to a screenshot published by MacRumors.
This new beta is at least the third one in under a month to carry identical focus areas for developers, and no known issues, indicating that Apple is looking for specific bugs that may affect a number of core system components, as it prepares to upgrade its Mac userbase to Mac OS X Lion.
The next-generation Mac OS is scheduled to debut this summer, though it is unclear whether the company will only feature the software as a preview, or whether it will make it immediately available to the masses.
Once Mac OS X Lion rolls out of Cupertino, Snow Leopard development is likely to slow down and eventually halt, as was the case with Mac OS X Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), whose development cycle ended with version 10.5.8.
The latest betas indicate that this is the case with Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6.7, which should also arrive for the Server edition of Snow Leopard as well.
With the seeding of Mac OS X 10.6.7 Build 10J846 in January, Apple signaled that the Server OS was suffering from one known issues - “clients may fail to NetBoot from NetRestore image of 10.6.6 created with Mac OS X Server 10.6.6.”
It is unknown whether these problems, or others that may have been discovered in the meanwhile, have been addressed.