It’s official; Apple’s Mac OS 10.5 Leopard is now available for pre-order through the Apple Store and will ship and be available in stores next Friday, October 26 at 6pm. Leopard is boasting over 300 new features in the OS including Time Machine for backups, a new Finder for browsing and sharing files, Spaces for navigating between multiple applications, Quick Look so you don’t have to open an application just to peak at a file, improved chatting and mail applications and a cool dock with Stacks as you can see in the photo here. The new OS also has parental controls to help children safely surf and communicate and the Safari 3 web browser.

Apple’s new version of the Mac OS X named Leopard which was targeted for early June has been delayed according to the company in order to focus its resources and efforts on the iPhone instead. The company announced on Thursday that they plan to “borrow some key software engineering and QA resources” from the Leopard OS team.

Apple does however plan to have some beta versions of the OS available in June at the Worldwide Developers Conference. The final release of Leopard has been delayed about 4 months and …

Rumors are swishing around the grape vine (having originated on the Think Secret rumor website) that Apple may be hatching a secret plan to release its next iteration of Mac OS X, Leopard, in June.

Now before you go throwing a bucket of cold water on the story, you do remember that the iPhone is slated to debut in June, possibly even June 11. Apple CEO Steve Jobs told attendees at last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference that Leopard would be on store shelves in the spring of 2007, and summer does fall …