Here's a brief catch-up with the software related news of this week:

AppleWorks officially discontinued

Apple has officially announced that the development of AppleWorks has been discontinued. AppleWorks is the ancestor of iWork.

Formerly named ClarisWorks, the office productivity suite featured a word processor, spreadsheet and vectorial drawing and was integrated into one software block which shipped with Apple's Macintosh computers in the nineties and early 00s.

Apple asks for Leopard beta feedback to developers

Apple is asking developers to provide feedback on the 9A499 beta of Leopard, MacRumors reports.

Developers are asked to qualify several parts of the beta seed with the following choices:

- Much Worse
- Somewhat worse
- About the same
- Somewhat better
- Much better

According to MacScoop sources, and as already mentioned in one of our earlier reports. Apple is now headed towards a Final Candidate release for late this month or early next.

Leopard hacked to run on AMD/Intel

Meanwhile, the Hackint0sh team, already known for their experiments on hacking Mac software, iPods and the iPhone have achieved running the latest Mac OS X Leopard beta seed on non Apple hardware with Intel or AMD processors.

Full instructions here.