After making a post about Akasha yesterday (https://steemit.com/socialnetwork/@moodledidoodledi/akasha-project-steemit-successor-or-disappointing-newcomer), the project moved forward on all fronts today. revealing their roadmap and giving a preview of their design, Akasha proved that they are NOT creating a hoax like Ethereal.
What are the news?
1. Pre-Alpha starting this October
Akasha will invite everyone that submitted their e-mail address to a pre-alpha starting this October. After this there will be an open alpha and finally a version 1.0. Of course there are evaluations and changes between each steps. You can read the full roadmap here: http://blog.akasha.world/2016/09/30/launch-imminent/
2. Screenshots of the design were released along with some more information on reddit
In my opinion, the design of Akasha seems to succeed the steemit design, making things easier to overlook and to organize. Akasha has a good "tag" overwiew, and apparently does not come with the option to filter posts through "new", "hot", "trending", "promoted" and "active" (as known from steemit). Most eye catching is the dislike button, making it possible to directly down vote a post. Most important: Somehow these screenshots don't look like as if Akasha would run in your browser (at least to me). Referring to this reddit post (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5589b8/akasha_prealpha_launch_tentative_roadmap/d88l2fk), the Akasha team is trying to keep the design plain and simple but yet saying it may still be changed through the different phases of the project.
As always: if you find any information being wrong please post below and I will change/edit this post. Source of this information are the links mentioned in this post.