I have been waiting for this for a very long time…

One of the major problems with working in Mac IT has been the lack of a space to discuss pre-release seeds of major OS X versions, ie the current state of Snow Leopard 10.6.

Things change a lot between major releases. Seemingly small changes by Apple can have an enormous impact upon workflow, and when you couple this with the fact that new hardware will often only work correctly on the latest OS X release, you often end up being forced to support 10.x.0 releases that simply don’t work correctly.

To get around this you stagger bulk purchases to avoid the periods when new OS versions are released, and you pay for ADC accounts that give you access to the pre-release seeds.

The problem is that testing is time consuming, and good bug reporting is even more so.  There’s nothing more dispiriting than spending several hours putting together a good bug report for Apple, only to submit it and get it marked as a duplicate.

Sure, there were the AppleSeed forums, but they’ve never really taken off, which I can only assume means that there really aren’t that many Mac IT people on the AppleSeed program.

Ta-da! https://devforums.apple.com/community/mac

Now we have a space we can talk in that is sanctioned by Apple. If it turns out that something fundamental is broken or works completely differently in a pre-release seed, we can share this information with each other, leading to more discrete bug reports to Apple, and leading to an OS that upon release hopefully works better in all sorts of deployments.

Well done Apple.