As reported on Saturday, Apple has widely seeded to developers the build 8A294 of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. Here is a quick review of this build.

The first thing we can notice is the fact Mac OS X asks you if you want to enable Network Management during startup, the feature has not been tested though.

In terms of performance, there are dramatic improvements in this build, especially on the Finder and on application launches.

The build is also much more stable than the last tested build, many bugs have been fixed especially on the Finder and on 2D/3D graphics.

This build has a working version of iCal 1.6 but we can't notice any apparent changes.

There is a feature in iChat that was already in earlier betas but that was never reported here. It is now possible to configure multiple user accounts, this is a very useful feature.

Mail has a new feature that I don't know if it was already here, you can now resize attached images.

Finally, we can notice some slight interface changes, the Apple Menu item background is now gray and not blue and the spootlight menu magifying glass icon is now blinking.

Some readers asked for another screenshot of Quartz Composer, here it is, running "Rings" sample.