iPad & tablets

Navigation on a tablet

The navigation column, the context panel, and how moving around changes.

On a phone the five sections live in a bar along the bottom, and every detail screen covers it. On a tablet they live in a column down the left edge that nothing covers — so you always know where you are, and one tap gets you anywhere.

The sections and their order are identical to the phone's: Collection, Search, Scan, Decks, Profile. Everything you know about them still applies; only where you tap has moved.

Coming back to where you were

Tapping a section takes you back to what you were last looking at in it, not to the top of it. Leave a deck half-read to check a price in Collection, tap Decks again, and the deck is still there — scrolled to where you left it, on the tab you left it on.

Two exceptions, both deliberate:

  • Playtest and Simulate are not restored. A shuffled library and a board full of cards only exist while the session is running; returning to a dead one would be worse than returning to the deck. You land on the deck instead.
  • Signing out clears it. The next account starts clean.

The context panel

Sections that have more to show than a list of screens get a second column next to the navigation one:

SectionWhat the panel holds
CollectionYour tools — Sales, Loans, Rules, Movers, Alerts, Watchlist and the rest
ProfileYour settings and account sections, the way Settings.app does it
DecksThe open deck's navigator — appears only while a deck is open
Search, ScanNo panel; the extra width goes to your content

The panel deliberately does not mirror what is already on screen. A sidebar earns its width by showing what the main pane cannot: with no deck open, the deck covers are the navigator, so there is no panel — and with a deck open, the panel becomes the deck's own navigation so you can jump between Visual, Stack, Ideas and Tokens without leaving the cards.

You can collapse a panel you don't want with the chevron on the navigation column. That choice is remembered per section — collapsing Profile's panel does not collapse the one in Collection.

When a section has no panel, or you have collapsed it, the space is not left empty — your content widens to fill it, and the card grid adds columns to match.

Going back

Detail screens keep a back chevron exactly as they do on a phone, with one refinement: when the panel beside a screen is already the thing that navigates to it, the chevron stands down. It would only take you where the panel already is.

Navigation on a tablet - Docs | Silvane, MTG Collection Tracker