The Gold Master (GM) version of Apple’s new upcoming version of OS X, Mountain Lion, was released yesterday to registered Apple developers, hinting at an imminent release. This version is often the “final” version of the operating system before being released to the public, unless any bugs are discovered by developers and the OS code is “frozen”, often meaning no further changes are going to be made.
The GM release of Mountain Lion was released to registered Apple developers yesterday.
The release of the Mountain Lion GM version puts the operating system on a good schedule and although Apple haven’t stated any precise release date (in their WWDC 2012 keynote from last month they only mentioned “July”), when considered with the previous GM release of Lion it’s looking to be released in the last week of this month. Lion’s GM release was pushed out to registered developers on July 1st, with the final version coming 20 days later so we can hint at a release date somewhere between July 27 – 31st.
The release of the GM version has also prompted Apple to start requesting developers to push out Mountain Lion compatible version of their apps, which was displayed prominently on their developer page. Apple have seeded the GM version of their development software, Xcode 4.4, to help developers achieve this.
Developers have already been requested to start submitting Mountain Lion compatible Mac applications.
Several common Mac apps have already been updated to support Mountain Lion, including Sparrow and Skype and given the imminent release of the new operating system, expect most other common apps to receive updates over the next coming weeks. Apple also seeded OS X 10.7.5 to developers, which presumably readies the user’s Mac for the Mountain Lion upgrade, although there’s nothing in the version’s change log to hint at this.
For a full guide on how to ready your Mac for Mountain Lion, head over to Jacob’s very detailed tutorial on our sister site, MacTuts+, which was launched yesterday. And please feel free to share all your thoughts and excitement about Mountain Lion in the comments section below!