Briefly: Apple prepping new Snow Leopard, iWeb, ARD updates

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

People familiar with the ongoing development of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard say Apple is gearing up to provide some developers with a new build of the next-gen OS in the near term.

The target build is said to be 10A286, which could change at any time. Regardless of the build, an identically numbered beta of Snow Leopard Server should arrive in tandum.

Apple last equipped Apple Developer Connection members with build 10A261 in early February. Around that time it was reported that Snow Leopard would include Core Location and Multi-Touch frameworks for third-party developers, and also deliver more intuitive printer driver delivery.

Specific to the 10A261 build were a handful of visual tweaks, such as a Put Back option in the Finder and the ability to drill down into stacks via a new grid-view interface, each of which were documented in a series of screenshots.

While calls from Apple legal have marred various reports on those features, including AppleInsider's, readers point out that several videos covering the design tweaks live on over at YouTube, like the one below.

iWeb

Also in the works, and reportedly undergoing internal testing, is iWeb 3.0.1. The update is believed to address issues with publishing iWeb pages to MobileMe and FTP, which has been one of the largest sources of complaints about the new Web editor that shipped last month as part of iLife '09.

One thread running since late January concerns FTP publishing errors where a test worked properly but the publish failed. Others have reported issues with pictures not appearing correctly while still others have struggled with uploading for a month only to discover their sleep settings were putting the computer to sleep before it could finish the upload.

Apple Remote Desktop & VoiceOver

Meanwhile, two other software updates growing closer to release, though very little information is know about them at this time. The first is Apple Remote Desktop 3.3, which is reportedly code-named Hook. Somewhat further behind is said to be a significant update to VoiceOver.