The column is not the screen

A phone is no longer one shape. It is 22:9 and it is 4:3, it folds open into
a square, it turns on its side, and a keypad phone is a 4:3 screen the size
of a card. None of that should reach the composition, which is a game drawn
at one scale in a ~200-unit column -- stretching that column to fit a screen
is how a designed thing turns into a responsive web page.

So the canvas covers the whole safe area and the column sits in the middle
of it at the width it has always been. What that leaves over is not a margin
to apologise for: every pixel nobody paints is ground, so on a wide screen
the leftover is the desktop, patterned and dithered, which is what a
Macintosh with a big monitor showed. It was a flat band of body background.

That handles every proportion in one direction and not the other. On a
landscape screen height is the scarce dimension, and a column stacked
board-over-controls shrinks the board to nothing to fit its own chrome
underneath -- so there is a second arrangement, in which the same two windows
sit side by side. Two windows on a desktop is not a concession to landscape;
it is what this system did with a wide screen. The sets list and the record
take a second column with it, because eight sets in one column of a
landscape picture is three of them and a scroll.

Which arrangement, and at what upscale, is chosen rather than calculated.
Both were tried as formulas first and both kept being wrong at the edges: a
threshold on the proportion sends a 768x800 fold to the side-by-side
arrangement, where it comes out worse than stacked, and any expression that
gets the upscale right for a 900-tall desktop gets it wrong for a 393-tall
phone on its side. There are about a dozen candidates and each can be costed
exactly -- the board's size in real pixels, with a floor under how small a
layout unit may get, since a unit under two CSS pixels sets a six-unit label
at six pixels. chooseLayout builds them all and takes the best, so the
arrangement falls out of that rather than being a rule anyone has to defend.

Two bugs fell out of measuring it. The head and foot fractions of the
stacked column had no floors: on a 360x640 phone the foot came up seven
units short and the UNDO/RESET row was drawn fourteen pixels below the
bottom of the screen. They are now stated as the thing they hold, and the
head gives way first, being air above the board rather than anything in it.
And the title screen sized KLOTSKI off the column but placed it by a
fraction of the window height -- two measurements that agree on a tall phone
and pull apart on a short one, where it printed through the frame.

The tall phone is unchanged: same plate, same cell, same 64-unit head, and
the only pixels that move are the gauge's end labels, which now sit on the
ends of the scale they label rather than two units inside them.

commit

aa31fefd515fba22dc0203571210f3fd4e31298a

parent

2774b28e33977b7eb061c6e6b57b7ae3507eeab0

author

Dami <dami.etoile@gmail.com>