One Rect For All specificaiton

[Colin Holgate]

A key difference between showAll and noBorder is that with noBorder all of the content you will ever see has to lie within the card area. With showAll only the content that everyone will see is in the card area, there remember is off the edges of the card, and will get revealed to users with either wider or taller devices.

Almost all of the things I’ve done have been showAll, where either it’s a book like experience, where I want to be sure everyone sees the full height of the page (and there is extra sideline content that will appear), or it’s a game, where a bit more ground and sky appears on taller devices.

The one time I did use noBorder it was for a game that had interesting items in all directions, and so I used the 14:9 trick to compromise between 16:9 and 4:3 screens.

In terms of working on a card, showAll would have the advantage of taking up less screen space. You could use the 1024x768 iPad preset and then have extra content that extends out to 171 pixels either side of the card, that you don’t normally se while working on the stack. I did come across a case recently where extra tools were appearing on an Android screen, which effectively makes it even wider than 16:9. Taking the background image out further would solve that. noBorder wouldn’t have the same issue, but you would lose a bit more off the top and bottom of the area.

As an aside, 1400x900 is not hi res, it’s less than the non-Retina height of iPad Pro, and only 40% the area of regular iPad Retina. Still, you don’t have to use 1400x900, any 14:9 ratio would work, assuming you have LiveCode set to also do full screen.