Apple's next operating system has just been offered to developers with the gold master seed of OS X Lion, this version is usually the same version end users receive when it's released. With the OS hitting gold master status this early into July, we might see Lion much earlier in July then expected, possibly in the next week or so.

Previously with Snow Leopard, the time between hitting gold master status and being on the shelves was two weeks. This of course could be sped up as the released of Lion will be on the App Store and requires users to have OS X 10.6.8 installed, which lets you transition over to Lion.

Lion is set to feature over 250 new features such as full-screen application support, more multitouch gestures, system resume, auto save for data, AirDrop file transfer and a feature called "Launchpad" which looks identical to the icon-based app launcher found in iOS.