Mac OS X Tiger build 8A378

Only one week after the seed of Mac OS X Tiger build 8A369, Apple has already seeded the build 8A378 to a restricted number of developers, late last week. It looks like build seeding is accelerating, this is usually a sign that the final release is not so far.

One new feature not reported in the seed notes is on the Universal Access preferences pane: on the Mouse tab, you can now chose the cursor size. The feature is still a bit buggy though, it looks like there is no anti-aliasing on the cursor icon and that the mouse motion is a bit jerky.

Fixed issues in this release are:
- Plain text messages being sent as rich text, which causes messages sent from Tiger Mail to show up as attachments in other mail clients.
- Dock dragging problems.
- Dual 2 GHz and Dual 2.5 GHz G5's with SuperDrive install problems.
- Finder crashes when previewing Sorenson 3 video or PNG files.
- Volume corruption issues with upgrade and archive installs over 10.2.x (Jaguar).
- Setup Assistant hangs after playing the movie with upgrade installs over 10.3.x.
- Spotlight infinitely indexing after editing data in your Address Book.
- Carbon and Cocoa app window corruption problems after inactivity.
- Problems disabling .Mac Syncing.

A dozen of remaining issues are reported as well:
- .Mac syncing of Address Book can lead to loss of contact URL's in the Address Book. Disable Address Book syncing in the .Mac-->Sync preference pane for now.
- iDVD 5.x and iMovie 5.x fail to see iPhoto 5.x photos in a users iPhoto library.
- Some full-screen QuickTime trailers don't display video.

Issues still present since the last seed:
- There are still occasional reports of blue or grey screens after installation or at login. Workaround: reboot.
- iDisk syncing may hang upon occasion.
- The .Mac Sync pref pane and the Sync menu extra are slow and don't always agree on when syncing is happening.
- Keychain syncing may corrupt your keychain. Other data types should work (with the exception of contacts). Disable keychain syncing in the .Mac-->Sync preference pane for now.
- Very rarely, login, security dialog or remote access authentication may be refused. Workaround: reboot.
- Text input other than English is not recognized in authorization dialogs.

Issues for those installing the developer tools:
- Xcode crashes when building Carbon bundles and frameworks.
- AppleScript applications that reference bundles need to use the bundle extension (e.g. ".app")when referring to them.
- Text paths to aliases (e.g. "~/Desktop/") in AppleScript are incorrect.

Developers don't seem to be very happy with the current Spotlight development status, they find that the initial indexing is way too long, it may take a few days to index a large amount of data, no matter how fast your Mac is. The indexing is taking a lot of system ressources as well and makes the whole configuration quite slow.