Silvane on iPad
How the app rearranges itself on a tablet or a Mac, and what that buys you.
On a phone, Silvane is a stack of full-screen pages: you tap into a binder, look at a card, tap back out. That is the right model for a screen you hold in one hand, and on a phone nothing about it has changed.
On a tablet it is the wrong model. A 13-inch screen showing one phone page at a time wastes most of the glass, and every card you inspect means leaving the grid you were reading. So on a tablet the app lays itself out differently: navigation moves to the side, your collection stays on screen, and cards open next to it instead of on top of it.
What you get
- A navigation column instead of a bottom bar. The five sections move to the left edge, where they are always visible and never cover your content. See Navigation.
- A second column for the section you are in. Profile lists its settings, Collection lists its tools, and an open deck gets its whole navigator — so switching between a deck's Visual, Stack and Tokens views no longer means walking back through a menu.
- Cards open beside your collection. Tap a card and it slides into a panel on the right while the grid stays exactly where it was. Tap another card and the panel swaps. See The card panel.
- More cards per row. The same card-size preference that shows 2 per row on a phone shows 4 on an iPad in portrait and 6 in landscape.
- Bigger headings. Section headers, screen titles and headline figures scale up. Body text stays the size it already was, because readable is readable at any screen size.
When the layout changes
Silvane decides from the size of its window, not the model of your device. That matters on iPad, where you control the window.
| Your window | What you get |
|---|---|
| A phone, or Slide Over, or a narrow Split View | The phone layout, exactly as it has always been |
| iPad mini or an iPad in portrait | Navigation column plus your content |
| iPad in landscape, or a wide Split View | Navigation column, context panel, and your content |
Because it reads the window and not the device, everything follows along live: rotate the iPad, drag the Split View divider, resize a Stage Manager window, and the layout re-flows as you move — including the number of cards per row.
A narrow window is genuinely treated as a phone, not as a broken tablet. In Slide Over you get the bottom tab bar and bottom sheets back, because at that width they are the better design.
On a Mac
Silvane's iPad app installs and runs on Macs with Apple silicon (M1 and later) — same app, same account, same sync, in an ordinary Mac window.
This is the form factor the layout was built for. Because Silvane reads its window rather than your device, a Mac window behaves like a resizable iPad: drag the corner wider and the context panel appears and the card grid gains columns; drag it narrow and you get the phone layout back. Nothing to configure — it follows the window as you drag.
A full-screen Silvane on a large display is the most room the app can work with: navigation column, context panel, your collection, and a docked card panel, all at once, with nothing covering anything.
On Android tablets
The same layout applies on Android tablets in portrait and in split screen. Full-screen landscape is still locked to portrait for now — freeing it needs a change we want to test on real Android tablet hardware first.
Playtest is deliberately full screen
Playtest hides the navigation column and takes the whole display. It is the one place where the extra room should go to the board rather than to chrome.