And thusly is hope restored! Remember yesterday when we mentioned the extreme unlikelihood that rumors of a Friday "Tiger's Done!" announcement would come true? Well, it still isn't anything we'd exactly bet the farm on, and the prospect of a full-blown Stevenotesque media event is pretty much out of the question (unless Apple knows how to teleport reporters-- which we're not ruling out), but if you really had your heart set on some form of official acknowledgment from Apple that Tiger will ship sometime in April, something like, say, a Friday press release no longer appears to be completely incompatible with this plane of reality. Why? Because Tiger has apparently gone gold.

Yep, if you blinked, you missed it; the last we'd heard, Apple had just shipped build 8A425 to developers and designated it the first "final candidate," but now, seemingly mere moments later, AppleInsider reports that a newer build-- 8A428-- has officially been declared Tiger's gold master. Assuming that's true, there's no doubt it's already been whisked away (or possibly teleported) to the duplicators who are even now stamping out gazillions of retail Tiger disks in preparation for an imminent frenzy of mass consumption. Normal turnaround time for Apple turning a gold master into actual snazzily-boxed retail product sitting on store shelves is usually just a couple of weeks, so a mid-April ship date still sounds eminently doable.

Now, if you're not preordering from Amazon to lock in that $35 rebate, obviously you should buy your copy of Tiger at the nearest Apple retail store; after all, if you're going to pay the full retail price for this thing, you might as well get some entertainment for your hard-earned cash. And as you probably recall, when Panther first hit the scene, Apple stores held whopping great shindigs to celebrate the latest Mac OS X upgrade, at which they cranked up the tunes, handed out dog tags (for some reason), and... well, that's actually about all we can remember, although we've got the faintest mental image of an Apple retail employee towering above us with some sort of funnel rig and a great, big, mostly-empty bottle of something or other as the room spun gently around us. So keep your eyes peeled and your stomach pump handy, because if Apple is making similar plans for a Tiger intro party, you certainly don't want to miss a throwdown of that magnitude.

However you actually get your hot little hands on a copy, though, the real fun obviously comes when you finally install Tiger itself and can then flip all your Dashboard widgets over and back and over again 'til the cows come home (and floss, brush, go to sleep, dream cow-y little dreams, wake up, and go back out again for another day of serious cud-chewing). So this is it, early adopters: get plenty of rest, because Tiger is only three weeks away, tops. Will you be ready?