Regular alpha releases give us more control over what was done and what needs to be done in close future. We are using short TODO lists (polish), so testers know what they should expect in next alpha. Thanks to them a lot of critical (crash) issues were resolved: 0.6.6 is now very usable and I've now got a single crash for whole week (but we really need more testers).
We are getting not only fixes, but also new code (this is just alpha, so no core API changes only) like new emoticons selector (beevvy's work):
and improved expandable contacts list (my and White Eagle work :P):
We now have DBUS module by Uzi (very simple for now, but this will change).Also history got huge improvements: importing from older versions of Kadu is now about 10-50x faster than before (thanks to sqlite transactions support) and does now blocks Kadu anymore (again, transactions and threading - this is first time I've used producer-consumer pattern in real life). Now I'm working on bringing back status and SMS saving.
Still a lot work has left to do: GUI work (many mockups from our Season of Usability are still not implemented), modules porting, bug fixing, logic fixing and so on. After all that is done we will stop doing alpha releases and start doing beta ones - for bug fixing only.
