Both Kevin Jardine's as Coldtricks event plugin are still being in development.
I'm pretty sure they're making it perfectly compatible with 1.9 as it's out.

Most plugin dev's use the 1.9_dev version to test their plugins and will release their new versions once 1.9 is released to the public, which it is not now.
It's not because it's old that they don't work ;)

If you wish to follow the development of Event Manager you can always checkout the GitHub repository https://github.com/ColdTrick/event_manager

Since we have alot of plugins we sometimes forget to update the community versions, sorry ;)

We still have to begin working on the 1.9 version, but Elgg 1.9 is not out yet, so we have time