[Touch HD Themes and Apps] mrcraig:
Welcome to the our first 0.9 Alpha release (version 0.9.0.8294)

This release is Windows Mobile only. We will have our first Symbian 0.9 release in early January.

Please read through this post since there are some gotchas that you should be aware of.

Starting with this release we are starting our Alpha program much earlier, and introducing for each release a smaller set of enhancements. The benefits are:

* You get earlier access to releases

* It is clearer what is new and allows you to focus your feedback accordingly.

* We get feedback earlier and can better integrate it into the product.

Our target for this release is last week of January.

This release is basically the latest Skyfire 0.8.5 with the following additions (more to come over time):

Text resizing:

This is a new approach to improve the readability of larger sections of text on a web page.. Our current (e.g. 0.8.*) approach is ‘Smartfit’, which reflows text into a narrower column. When it worked it was ok, unfortunately it broke a lot of web sites.

This new approach simply increases the text size enough that you should be able to read it more comfortably once zoomed into the text area (e.g. into the column width). You can switch this feature on/off by using the ‘Smartfit’ toggle. This allows you to see the difference as well.

This is our first iteration. We are looking forward to hear your opinion.

WVGA and W(Q)VGA support:

Finally. Now we support both WVGA (800x480) and WQVGA (400x240) devices on both portrait and landscape format.

We have tested in-house the Sony Ericsson Experia X1 (WVGA) and the Samsung Omnia (WQVGA).

Please see the list of known issues for these phones. It’s early days so please help us report issues.

EXPERIMENTAL: Flash/Silverlight handling:

Experimental is what it says: this is something that we played around with and we wanted to get your opinion.

When the cursor (using the d-pad) is placed over a plug-in element (Flash or Silverlight) the cursor will change to a hand a red dot. This provides two functionalities:

1. Each click will move the cursor half the distance for better preciseness.

2. You can enter “Direct Edit mode” (click and hold):

This will now send all keystrokes directly to the embedded app. This opens up the possibility to enter text into Flash or Silverlight.

Play with it and tell us what you think.

Known issues for this release:

- Samsung Omnia sometimes disconnects after ~15-20sec when carrier data service is used (WiFi seems to work)

- Sony Ericsson Experia X1: soft menus are incorrectly mapped in portrait mode. This can be corrected in the Windows under settings.

Warning: WHEN YOU SEE AN UPGRADE FLAG IN SKYFIRE PLEASE IGNORE IT. This will unfortunately upgrade you to the production version and overwrite the Alpha release. If this happens, then uninstall Skyfire and reinstall the Alpha version. Sorry for this, will be addressed soon.

Your existing username and password in 0.8.5 beta (e.g. production) continues to work for this Alpha. Thus your bookmarks and history will be preserved.

To install:

Download from this post, extract and transfer the CAB file to your device. Then install. It will be cleaner if you uninstall Skyfire first.

Windows Mobile touch screen use: 0.9_Alpha_RC.8294-PPC50.CAB

Windows Mobile non-touch screen use: 0.9_Alpha_RC.8294-SMP50.CAB