14 DAY TRIAL // Apple is rumored to be planning the seeding of a new Mac OS X 10.6 Beta this week. Reportedly, the new build is said to be labeled 10A335 and may just pack those highly anticipated aesthetic changes that Apple is believed to have implemented in the new OS.
According to a report over at AppleInsider, people familiar with Apple's plans say that the Cupertino-based company is gearing up to hand April's second Snow Leopard build to developers. This would create a small, three-week gap between the latest Snow Leopard seed (10A314) and the one rumored for a release this week (10A335). The last we heard, Apple was encouraging developers to focus their testing efforts on 64-bit compatibility in their third-party kernel extensions.
The same report mentions that this week's target build may also see an uplifted interface, although Apple is likely to hold off any radical changes for an unveiling at WWDC '09. Additionally, the same people close with Apple say the build may also incorporate an early version of Remote Desktop 3.3. The remote administration utility is getting a mere maintenance update, tipsters pinpoint, delivering compatibility with Snow Leopard, as well as fixes for a number of bugs.
It is believed that Apple will need at least two months to polish up the software between the WWDC '09 showcase and the official public release. A launch in the August-September timeframe is the most realistic forecast for the time being.
As previously reported, Apple is likely to officially showcase Snow Leopard's polished-up interface (WWDC keynote), not in the beta build of the software, whose particularities are inevitably going to be leaked to the public minutes after the seeding.