Thursday, April 19, 2012

Download OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion (12A178Q) Developer Preview 3

Download OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion (12A178Q) Developer Preview 3

According to people who are familiar with the software, the release notes accompanying the build state that “OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3 is prerelease software,” and that developers should not attempt to use this build in a commercial operating environment, or on a machine that they rely on for work.

Testers are advised to back up all of their data before installing the software, as they will not be able to upgrade from the OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview to the ﬁnal release, nor will they be able to upgrade to any other OS X release.

For those testers whose installation of OS X Developer Preview 3 fails, Disk Utility can be used from a Recovery HD to repair the disk.

The OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview supports several Macintosh configurations starting with iMac (Mid 2007 or later) and ending with Mac Mini (Early 2009 or later).

Notably, the seed notes list a ton of known issues with the build, which is not out of the ordinary for a beta release, but it’s certainly not very often that Apple seeds such buggy software for testing - especially just a few months away from the final release.

“This build is being provided to you for testing and development purposes. Should you encounter any problems, please submit a bug report using the online Bug Reporter at bugreporter.apple.com/>,” Apple tells davelopers.

“Please make sure to include ‘10.8 (12A178q)’ in the bug title and description. This information will ensure that your bug is processed quickly.”

The full list of known issues in OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3 will be discussed in a separate article today.