Leopard in October

So it’s official, not just a rumor.

we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

I’m surprised. I fully expected that Leopard would ship in June. My suspicions were increased when I started following postings by an Apple employee on the Ruby Cocoa mailing list pushing for a 1.0 release by mid-April, evidently because Apple wants 1.0 in Leopard.

Am I disappointed? A little. Upset? Not at all. I’m happy that this will give me more time to work on Leopard-specific features for my products. Sure, I’d like to start using Xcode 3.0 full-time right now, and writing more garbage-collected Objective-C code; but if they need the time to get things polished and stable, better that than shipping something half-baked.