Practice sessions, and paper that links back to the moving play

Sideline mode gave you the playbook at the ground. This one is about the hour before you get there, and the paper you hand out when you arrive.

A session is a playbook with a clock beside it

There is a new Sessions page. A session is Tuesday night written down in order: some lines run a play you drew, some are just text — "Warm-up", "Water break", "Small-sided games to four goals" — and every line has a number of minutes against it. The minutes add up, and the total is printed at the top, so you find out that your session is seventy-five minutes long while you can still do something about it.

Print it and you get a run sheet: no diagrams, no rendering wait, just the order and the clock. It asks one question — which paper — and guesses the answer from your browser, so the usual case is a look and a click. Up to 40 lines on a sheet.

Deleting a session deletes the session and nothing else. The plays it ran are yours and stay in My Plays, because the session points at them and not the other way round.

Printed plays that point back at the moving one

A printed play is a still picture of a thing that moves, and that has always been the sad part of the PDF. Now, when you export a play card or print a booklet, there is a tickbox: Link back to the animated play. It is ticked by default.

Leave it ticked and the paper carries a QR code. A player, a parent or an assistant coach points a phone at it and watches the play animate in their browser — no account, no app. On a booklet, every play page gets its own.

Untick it and nothing is stored at all: no code, no saved copy, and the artefact prints exactly as it did before this existed. The code has to save a shareable copy of the play to work, so that tickbox is where you say yes to it — the same thing "Copy share link" has always done.

Two places deliberately have no code yet: the football call sheet and the wristband insert. One code per call would eat half the diagram at a legible size, and what those actually want is a single code for the whole sheet — which needs a playbook to have a shareable link, and it does not have one yet. It is the next thing.

Dark mode reaches the canvas

If you run your system dark, the pitch itself now follows, instead of being the one white rectangle in an otherwise dark app. The colours over the turf were re-measured for contrast rather than just darkened.

Every dialog in the app is also now the same dialog. The practical difference you will notice: ask the app two questions in a row and the second one waits its turn instead of replacing the first one mid-sentence.

Football: a touchdown is a carry or a catch

Football plays had a fixed target in the end zone, borrowed from the sports where scoring means shooting at a goal. Gridiron does not work like that — the ball crosses the line in somebody's hands — and the borrowed target was pulling the ball away from the player scoring by as much as 24 yards. It is gone, and the ball now finishes with the scorer.

Field goals still have no way to be drawn. That is a real gap and it is on the list.