Sideline mode: your playbook, huge, in the sun, with one thumb

You draw plays on a Tuesday night on a laptop. You use them on a Saturday morning on a phone, standing on grass, holding it in the hand that is not holding a whistle, with eleven under-12s waiting. Those are two different jobs, and until now Playmaker only did the first one.

Open any playbook and press Sideline mode.

The play, and almost nothing else

No toolbar, no modes, no export buttons. The pitch is drawn as large as its own shape allows, and every control lives in the bands a pitch's proportions leave empty at the top and bottom of a phone — so nothing is ever on top of the play. Swipe left for the next play in your running order, right to go back. The order is the one you set on the playbooks page, which is the same order the printed booklet uses.

Turn the phone sideways and the pitch gets about 30% bigger, because a half pitch is wider than it is deep. Sideline mode works that out and tells you.

A palette for daylight, measured rather than guessed

Screen colours are chosen indoors, and indoors is not where this gets used. A phone in the open shows you the colours it is emitting plus whatever the sky is bouncing off the glass, and that reflection lands on the dark half of every pair as hard as it lands on the light half.

So we measured it twice: the usual contrast ratio, and the ratio you actually get with the reflection added at a real ambient brightness. On the editor's palette, a blue player on green turf is 1.6:1 in bright open shade. Sideline mode's is 3.6:1, the white lines go from 4.6:1 to 5.9:1, and every sport's surface is taken to the same darkness so a white line reads the same on a basketball court as on a soccer pitch — today it does not, by more than a factor of two.

One honest note: nothing on any phone is legible in direct sun with the glass facing the sky. That is the hardware, not the palette. Open shade is where this makes the difference, and open shade is most Saturdays.

Buttons for a thumb, not a fingertip

The accessibility floor for a tap target is 44 px, which is 11.6 mm — an index finger belonging to somebody sitting down. A thumb pad is 19 to 25 mm across. Every control in sideline mode is at least 72 px, which is 19 mm, so you can hit it without looking and without aiming.

It stays awake, and it works when the bars drop

Sideline mode asks your phone to keep the screen on, so it does not lock in the middle of an explanation, and it hands the screen back the moment you leave.

The whole playbook arrives with the page. Once it is open, swiping to play twelve needs no network at all — which matters, because a suburban sports ground has one bar. Load it in the car park and it is yours for the morning.