Latest Mac OS X Seeds; Rosetta Becomes Optional in Snow Leopard?

Last week Apple seeded developers with Build 9G52 of Mac OS X 10.5.6. The latest seeds ask developers to continue testing Mobile Me syncing and Mail character sets and continues to list a number of fixes from previous versions. Apple is expected to release Mac OS X 10.5.6 in the near future.

HMBT.org also publishes seed notes from the latest Snow Leopard build (10A222) which was also released to developers last week. The newest seed offers new additions to Grand Central, which provides developers an easier way to harness the power of multiple processor cores.

Separately, we've heard that the newest version of Snow Leopard makes Rosetta an optional installation. Rosetta is Apple's PowerPC emulator for their Intel Macs, allowing Intel Mac owners to run legacy software that has not been upgraded for the Intel platform. This news comes shortly after an announcement that IBM had purchased Transitive, the company behind Rosetta's technology. The final release of Snow Leopard is also rumored to require an Intel Mac, thereby being the first version of Mac OS X to drop PowerPC support.

Apple first announced its transition from PowerPC to Intel processors in June, 2005.

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