Sources recently provided MacScoop a follow-up on the development of Mac OS X Leopard.

The news is pretty reassuring, as Apple's development team dedicated to the next major version of the company's operating system appears to be on track for a release on mid to late October.

However, there is a little update on the roadmap we obtained [1] in June as developers should now expect the Final Candidate build to arrive by next week or the week after. As a result, the road to the Golden Master build gets way shorter than we first expected.

Once the Final Candidate build is released, a testing period of two to three weeks will let the company's development team bring a Golden Master build which will be duplicated and packaged for release by the end of October.

Apple has officially stated that Mac OS X Leopard would be released during the month of October. Initially planned during the first half of this year, the development was subject of delay due to a focus of Apple's workforce on the release of the iPhone.