Anxious for Tiger? Well, don't fret-- it's so close you can practically smell it! No, seriously, take a nice, long whiff. It's like... like a quart container of leftover House Special Lo Mein that fell behind the fridge two nights ago.

Actually... wait here a minute.

[Insert "Girl From Ipanema" hold music here]

Okay, so it turns out that was a quart container of leftover House Special Lo Mein that fell behind the fridge two nights ago, but we can't reach it even with our Gopher Pick-Up and Reach Tool, so we're just going to wait a few months until it sprouts legs and walks out on its own. Mmmmm, funky. Regardless, though, the grapevine consensus seems to put Tiger's release well in advance of its June 30th deadline-- probably sometime in April, with Think Secret having reported the possibility of an official "It's Done" announcement coming as soon as this Friday (April Fools Day notwithstanding).

Our confidence in Apple throwing a "Release the Tiger!" media event this Friday is fading fast, however, since one would expect that Apple would want to invite, well, the media, and there's no word of any such shindig at MacMinute or CNET. Furthermore, AppleInsider reports that Apple has just seeded a new build of Tiger to developers, and while it's allegedly the first to be designated a "final candidate" build, there are still a couple of known glitches in there, and there's "no indication that Tiger build 8A425 will become gold master." So the odds of Apple wrapping up development in time to sweep a pack of journalists into Moscone for a Grand Unveiling before the week is up are, shall we say, a tad on the svelte side.

That said, if AppleInsider is right about the recently-released 8A425 seed officially being a final candidate build, then it certainly won't be much longer before we can finally waste all our time launching new Dashboard widgets just to watch the cool ripply effect. (Good thing, too-- we're just about bored with playing with Panther's Exposé window-dance and the Fast User Switching rotatey-cube thingy, and for a second there, we thought we might actually have to get productive or something. Talk about dodging a bullet.) After a few final candidate builds, one will eventually be declared gold master, at which point it'll be whisked off for super-ultra-crazy-fast duplication and Steve will regale the press with tales about how Tiger's imminent release will end world hunger, cure all known diseases, and patch things up between Brad and Jennifer.

So AppleInsider's latest estimate for when Tiger will actually be available on store shelves to bestow miracles upon the land is now "the third week in April," with the Apple Store likely accepting preorders a couple of weeks before. (Of course, you can already preorder copies at Amazon.com with a $35 rebate, as we've been pimping all week.) That's pretty good timing, what with tax day and all; if you're getting a refund, you can blow some of it on a copy of Tiger, and if you wind up having to write the government a check, instead, you can at least blow even more cash on a snazzy new operating system to help take the sting out of forking all your money over to the feds. Nothing soothes the soul like a little extra eye candy.