Skales 12.9.0 - Fable

The release that introduces itself.

Every version so far handed you an empty message box and wished you luck. This one does not. Skales opens by asking who you are, a newcomer or someone who has done this before, and reshapes the whole first run around the answer: plain language and a guided provider choice for the one, dense screens and skippable blocks for the other. Theme, accent, city, weather, voice, notifications and safety are settled while you are already there, your phone pairs from inside the run, and the last button plays fifteen seconds of what you just set up instead of dropping you into silence. Docs became Guide, one page that shows what your machine is actually ready to do and puts a real prompt in the composer for you to press send on. Memory gained a search box over everything it holds, and Skales itself gained the same search, so it can find a note it wrote months ago without guessing the name. An idle window is finally idle again, around sixty background timers now stop while you are looking at something else and refresh the instant you come back, and Skales says out loud when it healed itself rather than returning as if nothing had happened.

Skales Mobile 2.9.0 carries the same release on Android and iOS.

Added

• Skales tells you when it healed itself. If the background engine dies, every open window now shows what happened and why while it restarts, and confirms when it is back - including windows that never noticed a thing.

• New installations start on Claude Sonnet 5. Existing settings are untouched - whatever model you chose stays chosen.

• The setup now ends with fifteen seconds of Skales, not an empty chat. Pressing the last button plays four full-bleed cards: what Studio makes and that it can go into the Discover feed, an agent ticking a goal off by itself, Iris listening and answering, and the Guide as the door to everything else. One press skips it from any card, it is never shown unasked a second time, and with reduced motion switched on the cards stand still and you press Next. Guide has a "Watch the intro" line to play it again.

• Two cards that appear where they are an answer. The first Skales Visual you finish offers to put it in the Discover feed, and a run longer than two minutes that finishes while you are somewhere else offers to tell you next time - the second one only while notifications are actually off. Each is offered once, both can be closed without being asked again, and both stay quiet while notifications are muted or during quiet hours.

• A switch for staying awake in the background. Settings > Desktop App now carries "Stay Awake in the Background". On, which is the default and what every release so far has done, Skales keeps the system from parking it so reminders, scheduled tasks and autonomous work keep running while the window is not in front. Off arms that only while a job is actually in flight, which is the setting for a laptop on battery. The change takes effect immediately, with no restart.

• Memory can be searched. The Memory page opens with a search box over everything stored - topic names and the text inside them, across the index, the topic files and the saved short-term, long-term and episodic records - with hits highlighted and a Meaning toggle that appears only when an embedding provider is configured. Skales itself gained the same search as a tool, so it can find a note it wrote months ago without guessing the topic name, and asking for a topic that does not exist now answers with the closest ones that do.

• The first run now asks who you are before it asks for keys. A new question near the top - newcomer or AI-head - reshapes the whole setup: newcomers get plain-language explanations under every technical term and a guided provider choice, experienced users get dense screens and can skip whole blocks. The answer is remembered and keeps shaping recommendations after setup.

• Setup covers the everyday now. Theme with live previews, light/dark/ system, accent tone, your city, weather, notifications, a voice you can hear before choosing, safety mode and telemetry are all settled during the first run - writing the same settings the Settings page writes, so nothing exists twice. Feature cards with small live animations introduce AIPointer, the desktop buddy, Iris and Studio, and switch them on right there. A QR card pairs your phone without leaving setup, including the allow/deny confirmation, and the whole run works offline: every card degrades to a named fallback and Continue always stays reachable. Progress survives a restart and resumes exactly where you stopped.

• Docs became Guide. One page with two entrances: "I want to..." paths sorted by how much setup they need, and a catalogue of what is actually possible - each line showing live whether your machine is ready, with a real example prompt that lands editable in the composer. Settings open as a popup on top of the page, and the bundled handbook stays available offline. Setup ends on a card that shows how much of Skales is already set up.

• Your experience level reaches a connected phone instantly. Answering the newcomer question on the desktop no longer waits for the next reconnect - a paired phone learns it the moment you answer.

• Setup can be replayed without losing anything. Guide and Settings > General offer "run onboarding again": every answer arrives prefilled with the current state, and finishing merges only what you changed - identity, sessions and history stay untouched.

Changed

• An idle window is idle again. Around sixty background timers kept running at full rate on a window nobody was looking at - the dashboard's own CPU readout polled twice a second, the Discover network graph redrew its physics sixty times a second, Iris kept a WebGL scene painting behind whatever was in front of it, and Studio, Flow, Playground, Playbooks, Teams, Logs, the Code window and the Autopilot and Organization panels each kept their own. Every one of them now pauses while the window is hidden or unfocused (only checking "hidden" misses a covered window on Windows entirely) and refreshes the instant it comes back, so nothing reads stale; clocks read their start stamp rather than counting ticks, so they are right on the first tick back rather than behind by however long you were away. What genuinely has to run while you are away still does - completed runs, renders, recordings, calls, the presentation clock, the buddy, OS notifications - and pays with a backoff instead: the notification drain went from every two seconds to every ten, stretching to thirty while there is nothing to deliver. This cannot quietly grow back, and every case that genuinely has to keep running while you are away still does.
• Flat got flatter. The Flat sidebar is a menu now, not a row of buttons: 13px entries, tight rows, no pill on the active item - a soft tint and a 2px accent edge carry the position instead. Header, status card, switcher and foot bar slimmed down to match. Skales X and Classic are untouched, and a test walks every Flat rule to keep it that way.
• Templates is back in the sidebar. The templates page never left - only its door did. It now sits in the System group right under Custom Widgets, and every card still lands its prompt editable in the composer.
• Three themes instead of six. Obsidian, Snowfield and Neon are retired; anyone using them lands on Classic once, with a short notice. Slate is now Flat and means it: grey and white, lime as the only colour, a text-only sidebar, tighter lines, emojis in greyscale - the logo and the buddy keep their colours. Preset accent tones now also work on Flat.

Fixed

• The Autopilot cockpit is current the moment you come back. Returning to the window refreshes status, tasks, logs and goals immediately instead of showing up to eight seconds of old state.
• A renamed chat carries its new name into a second window. Renaming, and the automatic title, now reach every surface instead of only the one you were looking at.
• Background notification delivery cannot lose itself anymore. A wake during a running delivery pass no longer forks the schedule, and a single failed server answer no longer silently ends it.
• The token wall now says that it is one. Changing the remote-access token also locks out the Skales window on a paired phone; that refusal was indistinguishable from a working page. It now names itself in the reply, and nothing changes for older devices.
• Studio gallery cards keep the shape their media was made in. A 9:16 visual is tall in the gallery, the same way it is tall everywhere else - instead of being cropped into a square.
• Reopened conversations show the team pill again. A turn that fanned out to sub-agents records how many worked on it, so the badge survives a restart instead of appearing only while you watched.
• More of Skales' tools name the capability they belong to. Skales can now say what it has instead of only having it, and reports this completely.
• A slow image no longer dies at an invisible deadline. The vision path now honours the request-timeout setting and grants extra time by attachment size, a transport failure ends the turn with a named card and a Retry button instead of a raw exception leaking into the answer, and the model is finally told that images arrive through vision - it will not try to read a JPEG as text any more.
• A failed send no longer eats your message. Attachments return to the composer when a run is not accepted, and a run that dies before answering says so with a Retry instead of silence.
• One picture, once. An attached image rendered up to three times - live and as a ghost after reload. One layer now wins, and old sessions are repaired on display.
• Chat titles hold still. No renaming mid-stream, and an automatic title no longer reorders your hi...

Skales 12.8.5 - Mirror

Fixed

• A cancelled upload no longer takes the server down with it. Releasing the microphone, reloading the page mid-answer or letting a voice detector restart could end the whole Skales server, and with it every agent, the scheduler, the autopilot and any background work in progress. The cause sits in the runtime's own machinery: it finishes reading an abandoned request body by closing a stream twice, from a place no error handling can reach. That one fault is now recognised and outlived - written down, with its stack, so it stays visible - while every other kind of crash still ends the server the way it always has.
• A released microphone stops costing money. A transcription whose client had already walked away ran to the end at Groq, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Azure or Skales IQ, and when the disconnect looked like a refusal, the next provider was tried after it. A cancelled recording now cancels the call it started, and a cancellation is answered as one instead of as a failed transcription.
• Pressing the microphone twice sends once. Every voice surface - chat dictation, the chat microphone, Call mode, Iris and audio attachments - posted without knowing about the others or about its own previous run, so a fast second press or a restarting voice detector put two large uploads on the wire at once. A newer recording now replaces the older one cleanly and the replaced one leaves without an error message. Several audio files attached together still transcribe side by side.
• The Telegram bot no longer disappears without a word. An unexpected fault ended the bot process leaving nothing written down anywhere, so a restart looked like it had stopped for no reason. Every fault is now recorded with its stack, and the one stream fault above is survived there too - the bot sends media through the same machinery.
• A tool that runs into a missing WordPress route says which plugin to update. The message a user actually got was "the plugin is not active on that site", and it was the wrong advice: on a site that connects fine, an older connector simply does not carry the newer routes yet. That diagnosis never even reached the screen, because it was tested against the words of the message and WordPress does not put "404" in its sentence. Both halves are fixed - the reason is read where WordPress actually writes it, and a missing Skales route now names the plugin version to update to. It is only shown after both address forms have been tried, so a site on plain permalinks is never told this.
• A page is not a post when Skales asks whether it may write. The check that runs before every WordPress call asked for the post rights when the tool was about to touch a page, and for edit rights when it was about to delete. An account that may edit posts but no pages was waved through and then refused by WordPress itself, as a bare 403 the model could not read. Deleting and reading now also ask about the object they were actually given.
• Skales names itself to the connector plugin. The handshake carried the plugin's version but never the app's, so the plugin could not say whether Skales was the outdated half of the pair. It now does, and when the plugin says so, that sentence is shown next to the one about the plugin. Where the plugin publishes its route level, that number decides the message instead of the version string - so a site that already carries every route Skales calls is no longer asked to update for nothing.
• Minimax pointed at two different countries at once. The chat default addressed the old api.minimax.chat, while the Refresh Models button on the same card asked api.minimaxi.com, which is the mainland China deployment and refuses an international key. Both halves now address the international host. A base URL you entered yourself is untouched.
• Developer, Docs listed tools that do not exist. Fifteen entries carried invented names - among them calendar_list_events and calendar_create_event, which are really list_calendar_events and create_calendar_event - and one entry described a chat skill as a tool. Every name on the page is now the name the model answers to, and the safety each one promises is the one that is actually applied.
• A failed WordPress connection says why it failed. Test Connection and the WordPress screen both answered every failure with the same flat "Connection failed", no matter whether the site had rejected the token, answered 404, run into a timeout or handed back a firewall page. The real reason now reaches the screen, in the same words the WordPress tools have always used.
• A site with plain permalinks connects. WordPress only serves /wp-json/ when pretty permalinks are switched on; with the default setting the identical route exists only under ?rest_route=. Skales tried the first form and gave up. It now tries the other one when the first answers 404, and remembers which form that site speaks.
• An outdated connector plugin is named. An old plugin answered the handshake and then let every newer tool run into "not found". The version is now checked at the handshake and named on both screens, including the case where the plugin is too old to report a version at all. Nothing is blocked: what the old plugin can do, it still does.
• Two new model profiles ship inside the app. Muse Glimmer and DBRX were added to the shared profile library, but only machines that can reach GitHub received them - offline installs kept running both untuned, including Muse Glimmer 30B, which Skales' own local catalogue recommends as its agentic flagship. Both profiles are now built into the app itself.
• Local speech now works on Windows and on Apple Silicon. The engine behind dictation and read-aloud loads a native library chosen by platform, and every release since it arrived carried only the one belonging to the machine that built the package. A Windows install therefore held macOS libraries and no Windows one, and reported that the module could not be found - which read like a damaged download and was nothing a reinstall could ever repair. The Apple Silicon disk image had the same hole with an Intel library in it. Each package now carries the library its own machines can load, and no other, and a build that gets this wrong stops before it is packaged.
• A speech engine that cannot load says why, and writes it down. The old message named neither the cause nor the platform and left no trace in the system log at all. It now names the missing piece, says plainly that the gap is in the download rather than on the machine, and records one line in the log so a bug report has something to carry.
• Google Calendar and Discord can be set up again. Both cards lost their Configure button when the settings switches were unified, and the switch that was left behind ran the disconnect: the only control on the card asked whether you were sure and then deleted the connection, and nothing anywhere could open the panel holding the API key, the calendar IDs or the bot token. Both cards carry the full row again - a switch for the skill, Configure to unfold the setup, and Disconnect as its own red action with a confirmation. Browser Control lost the same button and had its switch wired to the panel instead of the skill, so it could be neither turned on nor off from its card; that one is fixed too. All fourteen collapsible setup panels in Settings are now checked before every build, so a card cannot go unopenable again.
• Skales knew about YouTube uploads and never said so. Publishing a video is a different Google permission from searching for one, and the capability report treated posting to YouTube and LinkedIn as always available whether anything was connected or not. It now reports the real state, and when your Google account was connected without the upload permission it says exactly that, and sends you to reconnect it with YouTube (upload) ticked instead of claiming Skales cannot upload at all.
• Skales can now describe its own memory, and the rest of YouTube. The long-term memory it keeps for you had no entry in the capability report at all, so asked what it remembers between sessions it had nothing to say while reading and writing that memory every turn. YouTube listed only search and kept quiet about video details, channel information, trending and caption tracks; browser automation left out attaching a file to a page. Every tool family is now measured against the report before each build, so a whole feature cannot go unmentioned again.
• The WordPress tools arrive together. With on-demand tool loading the 47 WordPress tools were spread over four different groups and no group named WordPress, so a model asked to work on your site fetched whichever group sounded closest and got eleven of them, then reported the rest missing. They are one group now, called wordpress, and it says what is in it.
• Generating a picture no longer ends the job it was part of. An agent that made an image halfway through a task dropped a bare "Image generated!" line into the chat and stopped there, having never seen the result of its own tool call, so the task it was given was simply abandoned, and asking it to carry on meant explaining the whole thing again. Making a picture is now a step like any other: the preview card still appears, and the same turn keeps going with the file it just produced. Video, speech and 3D generation already behaved this way and are unchanged.
• A picture attached in a chat is a real file, and Skales says where it is. Attachments were described correctly and then existed nowhere any tool could reach, so asking to post one, edit it or convert it failed on a file that looked like it was right there. Every attached picture is kept in the workspace and its location is now part of the conversation, so the tools that need the actual file can open it. Pictures sent from a phone or the browser interface were not being kept at all; t...