Apple narrows testing focus with latest Mac OS X 10.4.11 builds

Apple Inc. has increased the frequency at which it is seeding pre-release builds of its next Tiger operating system update, while at the same time asking developers to provide feedback on a smaller subset of the software's components.

Mac OS X 10.4.11

The Cupertino-based Mac maker this week began offering its developer community Mac OS X Update 10.4.11 builds 8S146 (PowerPC) and 8S2146 (Intel), people familiar with the matter have said.

Unlike earlier builds, which courted feedback on dozens of system components, notes accompanying the latest builds ask that developers focus their testing efforts on just a handful of areas, those people said. Among the target areas are Tiger's AFP services, AppleRAID, USB & Firewire Audio, Bluetooth, the Mac OS X Dock, Installer and Safari.

Both the new Intel and PowerPC builds have been fitted with four additional code corrections since the last pre-release builds of Mac OS X 10.4.11 began making the rounds on Friday. The fixes are reported to be identical across both builds, targeting bugs in AppleRAID, AppleVADriver, SAM Block Devices, and VPN and L2TP.

As of this week's seedings, people familiar with the software have said, 32 bug fixes have been made to the PowerPC version of Tiger and 30 to the Intel version.

Xcode 2.5 developer preview

Also this week, Apple seeded a developer preview of Xcode 2.5, which it describes as a minor update to its Tiger development tools that functions similar to the existing release of Xcode 2.4.1.

However, the preview release of the developers environment is the first to support development hosted on Tiger as well as the current seeds of Leopard.

People familiar with the Xcode 2.5 preview say it does not support Leopard as a target platform and is instead being released to smooth the transition of existing developer projects to the Xcode 3.0 release.