Apple Releases macOS Sierra 10.12.4 Beta 3 to Developers for Testing

Apple on Monday seeded the third beta of macOS Sierra 10.12.4 to developers. The new beta comes nearly two weeks following the second beta release.

macOS Sierra 10.12.4 Beta 3

Developers can download the third beta of macOS Sierra 10.12.4 – Build 16E163f – can be downloaded from the Apple Developer Center or via the “Update” tab in the Mac App Store.

The first beta brought a new Night Shift mode that automatically shifts a Mac’s display color to the warmer end of the color spectrum for evening computing, much like the iOS Night Shift mode introduced in iOS 9.3.

New features in macOS 10.12.4:

• Night Shift now available on the Mac.
• Dictation support for Shanghainese.
• Ask Siri about cricket scores, schedules and player rosters. Siri knows about statistics and data from the Indian Premier League and International Cricket Council.
• Updated PDFKit APIs for better displaying of PDFs in apps that use the framework.

Focus Areas

Apple has asked developers to focus testing on the following areas:

• Night Shift preference for automatically shifting the colors of your display to the warmer end of the spectrum after dark
• Siri support for checking Cricket scores, schedules, and player rosters from the Indian Premier League and International Cricket Council
• Dictation support for Shanghainese
• Reading, writing and navigating PDFs using system-provided APIs

We’ll keep our eyes out for news of any other new features in macOS Sierra 10.12.4, and will report them here in this space.

Apple also released the third beta of Xcode 8.3. The Xcode beta – Build 8W132p – can also be downloaded from the Apple Developer Center.