Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 completed development!

It appears as if Apple is on track with its self-imposed release-date set in October for its new Mac OS X operating system, named Leopard. Originally supposed to be unleashed earlier this year, it had been post-boned due to iPhone development issues. It is widely assumed that Friday October 26 will be the release date of the new species, which would fit into the historic picture of Mac OS release dates, which were always the last Friday of any given month.

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Sources claim to have learned that the system now has completed development, and Apple support staff has gone into the stage of receiving training-related material for the new system.

A source tells AppleInsider that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is now “finalized” to the point where Apple has begun to provide Leopard-related support training materials to its support staff.

Among these initial training materials were self-paced training modules on some of the operating system’s most popular features and components, such as installation methods, Mail and BootCamp.

The last full pre-release of Leopard arrived on September 21st, when Apple provided its vast developer community with Mac OS X Leopard build 9A559 in what was then assumed to be a release candidate.

A week later the company released a small automatic software update for build 9A559 but did not increase or otherwise change the Leopard build number as it had done in previous cases. Therefore, build 9A559 is the last known candidate that could be declared Gold Master and released to manufacturing.

Not too long ago reports emerged that there was only one bug remaining, concerning the archived Install Method. If this information is true, then this bug seems to be fixed, and Apple has to declare Golden Master pretty soon, in order to make it for the October release date.

Source: AppleInsider