UPDATE: It appears that Leopard is now Final Candidate!

Apple's next generation operating system is nearing Final Candidate status according to several reports we obtained.

Two builds of Leopard were seeded during the last few days, the first was labeled "9A528d" and the second "9A559". The latest one's seed note indicates very few known issues and is overall very stable according to feedback we were given on it.

This confirms our follow-up on Leopard's development roadmap published [1] earlier this month but leaves no more than two to three weeks for Apple to release a Golden Master build. The word among internals is that Leopard will be on track for the late October release though.

Among changes noticed in the most recent build of Leopard are some visual tweaks we can see on this InsanelyMac forum thread [2].

Of interest, a new build (8S155/8S2155) of Mac OS X 10.4.11 update was also seeded this week but brings no hint at when it will be ready for release.