All of the Apple-related focus may have been on the new iPhone models and imminent release of iOS 7 but it seems the OS X engineers are still beavering away in the background. With an expected October release time ticking away for the Mac software team to eradicate any reported bugs and glitches within OS X 10.9 and get it ready for the primetime, the company has taken an additional step to reaching that end-goal with the release of OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 8 which also includes an updated version of iTunes 11.1.

Apple has just released the 7th Developer Preview of their latest operating system for the Mac, OS X Mavericks 10.9. The new update, carrying the build number 13A569, is aimed towards developers for testing purposes and can be downloaded from the Mac App Store or Mac Dev Center.

Since the focus of mainstream attention has remained almost squarely upon the progress of Apple’s iOS 7 betas, it’s rather easy to forget about OS X Mavericks 10.9, which is also currently being readied for prime time. While the name may have raised one or two eyebrows after a series of big cat releases, the changes made to the Mac operating system are very much business as usual, and the sixth developer preview doesn’t appear to offer anything radically different from the previous offering.

With iOS 7’s beta progress dominating most of the column inches within the blogosphere, the forthcoming version of OS X – Mavericks 10.9 – has been comparatively quiet in clocking up four preview releases so far. Today, OS X Mavericks 10.9 gets its fifth developer preview release, and although there’s no real word on any of the changes yet aside from a new iBooks app for Mac, it brings us just that little bit closer to that final, end-user release.

This year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and much of the time since, has been dominated by the talk and controversies of Apple’s new mobile OS. Yet despite the significance of this major mobile release, lest we forget that OS X is also a pivotal component of the Cupertino’s product line. OS X Mavericks 10.9 is also under constant development, and today, the fourth Developer preview of the upcoming Mac operating system has just been released.