Apple releases OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3
Apple on Wednesday supplied developers with the third preview build of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, giving developers a chance to test out the latest version of the prerelease software. — According to people familiar with the latest build …
Context & Ripple Effects
The third developer seed of Mountain Lion continues a cadence Apple has now run three cycles deep. With Lion in early 2011, Apple moved through a February hands-on preview and security-expert sharing phase before the build was nearing golden-master status around WWDC; the Leopard era followed the same preview-to-release-candidate arc across 2006 and 2007.
Preview 3 arriving in mid-April puts 10.8 on roughly the same spring testing runway Lion occupied a year earlier, which is why the story traveled quickly to The Verge, Computerworld, Cult of Mac, and Softpedia — the build itself is incremental, but its position on the calendar is the signal developers are reading.
First-order effects
- Registered Mac developers get a new 10.8 build to test their applications against Mountain Lion's APIs, with compatibility bugs now reportable while there is still time to fix them before ship.
Second-order effects
- Independent Mac software vendors face pressure to complete their own 10.8 certification on the Lion timetable — if Preview 3 tracks Lion's spring-to-WWDC rhythm, the commercial release window is the summer, and untested apps risk shipping broken on day one.
Third-order effects
- Three consecutive seeds across Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion point to the multi-year gaps of the Leopard era giving way to a compressed, near-annual Mac OS upgrade cycle, which shrinks the support horizon third-party Mac developers must plan around.
The trend: Apple is running the Mac on an iOS-style annual release cadence, with staged public developer previews replacing the long, quiet development gaps of earlier OS X versions.