Last night Martin merged his symbology-ng branch into QGIS trunk. This also includes the new labelling engine (currently implemented as a plugin). If you are using the OSGEO4W nightly builds the updated builds should now contain this functionality. I started playing around a bit with labelling, converting some old projects to use the new labelling engine. Here is a little before and after example (click on images to enlarge):

Old:

New:

You can see that using the new version, labels no longer collide and the spacing between them is much easier on the eye.

Now that Martin’s work is in I will start drawing up the roadmap for releasing QGIS 1.4, probably we will aim for an end of December release….