POWDER is a roguelike game, which is not a port of an existing roguelike. It is built around replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning.

Release notes:

Most of my effort has focussed on UI related issues with this release. My vision for the Action Bar is now realized. You can populate it with your own choice of actions or spells.

Akoi Meexx has been working extremely hard at a total-conversion tileset for POWDER which I’m proud to now make the default tileset!

I’ve moved my primary playing platform to the DS. I’m extremely happy with the current stylus interface. I have not had to use the buttons at all. This is fortunate as in the winter one can use the stylus with gloves, but I’ve had issues trying to use the buttons.

Changes:

The PPC Mac and Linux versions will no longer have psychedelic colours, but instead look normal. (Ben Hjelt)
[Mac] The Mac port now uses a .dmg making installation a snap! Note your .txt and .sav files will be saved to whatever directory you put the POWDER program into.
[SDL] The window icon was accidentally half brightness – it is now in its full glory.
There is now an action bar along the top of the screen as well. Further, you can reassign action bar entries when in the verb screen. Merely drag and drop to until the bar matches your dream layout!
There is now actionbars on the left and right of the screen. It is recommended you don’t use the top few of these as they will obscure your text output.
Your action bar settings are saved across sessions. If you mess things up, the Options menu has a Defaults entry that will revert them to the defaults.
From the Zap menu you can drag and drop spells to the action bar. This lets you cast specific spells with a single click.
On reading a spell or skill book, you will be given the full text of the spell or skill you are trying to learn. You will then have to confirm your selection. This requires two extra button pushes, but I hope such learning is rare and this helps people discover the spell text as [Select] is a tad bit obscure.
The background for the inventory screen has been changed into a series of boxes rather than the odd C symbol. This is also done on the layer beneath the items.
When you possess another creature and equip items, your original body will no longer mirror your new weapon choices.
Renaming yourself will change your actual name (the one for the win screen and character dump) rather than just your body’s name. (Grothias)
Linux port is now statically linked against libstdc++, so those of you who don’t have old libraries installed should be able to run it. (Martin Read, John Overmars)
The final inventory screen will no longer go to full-examine when you click on an item. Instead, it acts like the normal inventory where it does the short description on click and changes the item bar to reflect whether you can view the item. Similarly, the only way to quit it is to now press the inventory button again. (Or [B], of course) (Honourable mention to Richard Quirk who submitted a patch for this after I had already coded it)
Possess now takes Diagnose as a prerequisite.
The haunted island and other similar rooms that have monsters have been double checked to ensure they don’t allow stairs. (Martin Read)
[DS] Richard Quirk finished the earlier fix to support r21 of devkitPro. It turns out my refusal to use short-enums was the source of the incompatibility.
Requesting info (‘i’ or [Select]) on the cancel option of a spell book reading menu will no longer crash. (Ciaran Walsh)
You can drag items around your inventory screen to reorder them. You can drag into your equip slots to put them on or drag off equipped slots to remove them. (Richard Quirk)
it’s to its correction in cockatrice description. (Richard Quirk)
Eating items now grants ten times the foodvalue, bringing them more in line with eating corpses. (Brendan, Michal Bielinski)
One new map.
Brand new tileset – the Akoi Meexx tileset. This is a total conversion which has been made the new default tileset. Never fear, if you want the naked pink guy, you can change to the Classic tileset.

http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=release