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 history.

• Google Drive and Docs actually work. Creating a document hit a broken API path and always failed; downloading a Google Doc or Sheet tried to fetch bytes that do not exist and answered 403. Documents create properly now (with optional initial text), Workspace files export to a readable format, real binaries arrive undamaged as files, and errors name their true cause - including a missing permission.

• The local speech engine names the right gap. A build missing its platform package claimed "not a missing download" - the diagnosis now names both possible build gaps honestly.

• The connection card no longer says "connected" in red. Its colour was chosen separately from its words, and a keyless runtime like Skales Local did not count as connected at all. One tone now derives from the same state as the label, using theme tokens instead of hard-coded colours.

• A shared 3D visual draws in the feed instead of showing a black box. A moving visual shared to Discover used to render on the phone and nowhere else

  • the desktop feed and the moderation view showed an empty frame. Both now draw the same visual the phone does, and a simpler design still looks exactly as it did before.

• Sharing a visual no longer cuts it in half. A large shared visual could be silently trimmed, which broke it and left a black frame with nothing saying why. A share now sends exactly what was made, and one that is genuinely too large is refused clearly, up front, with the reason in the sentence.

• The setup keeps one face from start to finish. From the feature cards onward the wizard's header swapped the Skales mark for the buddy skin you had just picked. The mark is now the same on every screen of the run, and the buddy is shown where it is chosen.

• Setup screens are readable immediately. The feature previews stopped animating when they scrolled out of view, but they stopped on whichever frame they were standing on - and several of those frames are deliberately faint, which left cards permanently half-drawn. A stopped preview now simply rests. The step text also fades in twice as fast and can no longer be caught between two overlapping fades.

• Leaving the provider screen without choosing asks first. Pressing Continue with no card selected walked straight past the one question the defaults cannot answer. It now asks, in your language, and says what the machine will actually use if you go on. Going on still changes nothing.