Numerous sources, and the grapevine at large, are in agreement that Juno is in a nearly completed state — in fact, several developers had already been pulled off the project to join other operating systems development teams (Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” and iPhone OS 3.0) as of last Friday.

But so far this week, there has been no new developer seed nor has the update been released. Historically, for many reasons Apple has chosen to release point upgrades for OS X on Mondays or Tuesdays. In keeping with that trend, it is still possible that we could see a release in the next 24 hours….but at least one key source reports that may not happen.

In fact, this source — who has rarely been wrong, but is not necessarily in a position to know for certain whether any items remain on the Juno team’s to-do list (which was almost entirely minor bug fixes as of last week) — says that it could be a few more days, and there could be one final developer seed to test the associated bug fixes before posting 10.5.7 to the Software Update servers.

At this time, we are taking a wait-and-see attitude; if there is no public release today (Tuesday 5/05), then the grapevine consensus would seem to favor a final seed build and one final week of testing before a release early next week. The actual development process at Infinite Loop is a moving target, with no fixed/pre-planned release date so even the best “insider information” from anyone not directly working on Juno can be out of date in a matter of days or even hours.

Either way, we are confident that the release is imminent. Stay tuned to Rumors for all the latest on the 10.5.7 Update — we’ll be watching Software Update closely and will notify readers through our Twitter feed as well as this Web site as soon as Juno is posted to the public servers.