Happy Wednesday, Freewriters!
Today, we’re excited to release Alpha’s third Over-The-Air (OTA) firmware update, which contains exciting new features, improvements, and bug fixes!
New Features
🌍 International Keyboard Layouts: Alpha now supports an impressive 35 languages and 62 different keyboard layouts! From German and Norwegian to Esperanto and Faroese, writers worldwide can now easily use their preferred keyboard layout to express themselves naturally. Rått!
Languages: Albanian, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian.
Keyboard Layouts: Albanian, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Bulgarian (Phonetic), Canadian Multilingual, Colemak (English), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Danish (Dvorak), Dutch, English, English (Dvorak), English (Int'l), English (Int'l AltGr), Esperanto, Esperanto (English Intl), Estonian, Eurkey, Faroese, Finnish, French, French (Belgium), French (Bepo), French (Canada), French (Dvorak), French (Swiss), German, German (Dvorak), German (Swiss), Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Latvian (AltGr), Latvian (Apostrophe), Lithuanian, Macedonian, Maltese, Neo (German), Norwegian, Norwegian (Dvorak), Polish (Programmers), Polish (Programmers Dvorak), Polish (Qwerty), Polish (Qwertz), Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Spanish (Dvorak), Swedish, Swedish (Dvorak), Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian.
With this update, Alpha now supports 95%* of the installed keyboard layouts used on our Traveler and Smart Typewriter devices!
*The remaining 5% primarily consists of East Asian languages — specifically Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Unfortunately, supporting these languages and their associated input methods presents huge challenges for Alpha. We’ll never say never but if you need to type in these languages, it’s best to stick with Smart Typewriter or Traveler.
Improvements
✨ New Custom Typeface: We’ve implemented a brand-new, custom-designed typeface. This new typeface was hand-designed and optimized specifically for Alpha's LCD display, resulting in clearer, more distinct characters that significantly enhance legibility. The new typeface includes three sizes and a lot more characters to support all the new languages.
🏃🏼♂️➡️ Faster Typing Response: We've optimized the keyboard handling and resolved a specific issue that could cause missed keypresses. You should notice improved accuracy and even lower latency. Alpha can keep up with even the fastest typists.
✍🏼 Better Draft Handling: We’ve improved line wrapping consistency when scrolling so that whitespace no longer causes unexpected line wraps, as well as overall performance improvements, especially when inserting text.
🔒 Enhanced User Interface: Text input fields now scroll horizontally when text overflows, giving you a better view of long entries, and the device lockscreen has been simplified for ease of use.
Under The Hood Fixes
We've also made numerous behind-the-scenes improvements to make your Alpha more efficient and reliable, including optimizing memory usage and management and improving draft storage and handling.
This update represents months of dedicated work from our small but mighty development team, involving intricate font design, complex character mapping, and meticulous testing. These substantial enhancements took considerable time to implement correctly and we appreciate your patience throughout this process.
How To Get The Update
Alpha firmware rolls out automatically and will be available on your device when connected to Wi-Fi. You can also manually check for an update using these instructions.
For a full list of Alpha firmware improvements and fixes, please visit our Release Notes page.
Thank you for being part of the Freewrite community. Write on!
