As Windows 7 RC gets ready for its release, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard build 10A261 is released officially to select beta developers and testers this week according to an Italian Website, Macity.
Compared to earlier builds 10A190 and 10A222, there are few noticeable changes to the software other than minor adjustments to the System Preferences pane and bug fixes to the new Cocoa-based Finder. The User Interface remains mostly unchanged and the build is said to have more stability and speed. Developers are asked to focus on printer drivers, 3rd-party applications, and Microsoft Exchange support. Besides Grand Central and OpenCL, technologies designed to utilize multicore processors better and shift parallel computing tasks to multicore GPUs, Exchange support is one of the few major features of Snow Leopard.
Snow Leopard is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2009.