Managing software development

I’m only new at a lot of this, so go easy on me :)

I’m looking for ways to best manage the development and release cycle of Virtue and any other apps I have on the boil. At present, I use what I know — coding and compilation is done in Xcode, I manage all my code using Subversion, and I track issues (personally, it isn’t publicly available) using Trac. This works pretty well for me, but there are still things that bug me:

• Xcode’s speed: granted Virtue does what certain other people have been saying is a bad idea — it is composed of three frameworks, a carbon bundle, a static library and the application itself. I plan on taking a good hard look at this come the 0.6 development cycle.
• Xcode’s subversion support: it seems flaky… that could just be me though…
• Release versioning: At present, each build I release in the 0.5 cycle is automatically stamped with the current revision from my subversion repository. I’m not sure this is a great idea given the number of components, but it’s working so far (except when I want to do an official release, then I need to change the versions manually in the plist). Should I consider dropping versions for development builds entirely?
• Release distribution and notification: Well, if you’ve been following my releases here, you’ve been getting the whole show. Personally, I don’t want to be making releases on my blog – especially development releases. I’d love to set-​up an appcast, but I haven’t found the time — can anyone recommend a product?

If anyone has suggestions or ideas (or even just the words ‘Hi!’), please post away — I’d love feedback!