I'm not sure yet on the next HF date. Hopefully we can stick to the original timeframe of around December/January, but I have one "secret-for-now/yet-to-be-announced" feature that I really want to get into this hardfork (important enough to delay HF by a month or two if necessary to get it working), and we haven't started on it yet, so we'll see how it goes. Other features for the hardfork are either finished or in a state that I'm very comfortable with.

HAF work has progressed very well and I think we'll be ready for production release shortly after HiveFest. At that point we can start working on smart contract sidechain (it will be built on top of HAF).