Author Alexander Repty said he is preparing Version 1.0 and he released v.9.2 a couple of weeks ago. The new version fixes a power management issue and some other small bugs.
The program puts a slider control on the Menu Bar instead of the function keys. But that's really a small part of the feature set: users can set a level for the backlight and then have that setting made at startup. In addition, users can tell the Finder to stop automatically adjusting the backlight, a very useful feature.
On his blog, Repty presents an interesting post on the progress of the program's interface.