Layout & content

The timer screen isn’t a fixed design. Everything on it — the tournament title, the countdown, the blinds, the payout list — lives in a cell you can move, restyle, or remove. Layout & content is the editor for it, and it works directly on the timer itself: what you see while editing is the real screen, rendered with the real tournament data.

Note

Editing the layout is a Director privilege. Table Captains and players see the timer read-only and don’t get the Customize menu at all. See Roles & shared control.

Turning edit mode on

Tap the display settings icon (Customize) in the top app bar, then Layout & content in the Customize section. The screen splits, and an editing toolbar appears. You’re editing the layout that’s showing; to edit another, pick it in the menu’s Layouts section first.

Where the toolbar lands depends on the space available:

• Wide screens — landscape, or anything at least 800 points across — put the timer on the left and a fixed editing panel down the right side. Cell settings open inside that panel.
• Portrait phones put the timer on top and a compact bar underneath with Cut, Copy, Delete, and an Edit settings button that opens the settings as a sheet.

Both layouts share the same toolbar buttons:

• Undo and Redo step through your changes. History holds the last 50 edits, and rapid tweaks to the same setting — dragging a font-size slider, say — collapse into one step so undo doesn’t crawl back through every intermediate value.
• Save keeps your changes, Cancel throws them away. Cancel is red, because it discards everything since you entered edit mode.
• If you haven’t changed anything yet, a single Done button appears instead of Save and Cancel.

Tip

Unsaved edits survive leaving the screen. If you wander off to Players or Log and come back, the timer reopens in edit mode with your work still in progress. Nothing is written to the tournament until you tap Save.

Reading the editor

In edit mode every cell is outlined and labelled, including cells that the live timer would be hiding right now:

• Text cells are labelled with the name of the content they display — clock, blinds, player count.
• Rows and columns are labelled row, column, or auto, followed by their condition when they have one, e.g. column: {{ totalCollected > 0 }}.
• Chips, Tables, and QR code widgets are labelled with their names. One with nothing to show right now says why, inside the cell.
• Hidden cells — ones whose condition is currently false, or whose content produces no text — keep their place in the layout but get a diagonally striped label bar. They’re still fully editable; the stripes just tell you the live timer wouldn’t be drawing them at this moment.
• A text cell whose content evaluates to nothing shows a short preview of its raw text instead of blank space, so the cell stays findable. If the content name doesn’t resolve at all, the cell reads Missing variable "…".

Note

The crossed-out eye and the Currently hidden explanation belong to the widget gallery, not to this editor. Here, striping is the signal.

Live preview

The editing view is deliberately annotated — cells outlined, labelled, and striped so you can find and grab them. To see the screen the way viewers actually see it, the wide-screen editing panel carries a live preview at the bottom: a clean, read-only render of the timer with no outlines, no labels, and hidden cells genuinely hidden. It’s shaped to match your window, so it reads as a true miniature of the real thing.

It updates as you edit. Restyle the text, swap a background, drop in a widget — the preview picks up your draft immediately, rendered against the real tournament with chips and tables in place, exactly as it’ll look once you Save.

Tap the Preview header to collapse it and hand that height back to the editing controls above; tap again to bring it back. The app remembers which way you left it between sessions.

The preview belongs to the wide-screen layout only — portrait phones, where the controls already fill a compact bar, have no room for it. It also tucks itself away on any window too short to show both the controls and a usefully sized preview.

Selecting cells

Tap a cell to select it, and tap it again to deselect. Selection is additive — tapping a second cell adds it to the selection rather than replacing it, which is how you restyle several cells at once.

A Selected: 2 chip shows how many cells are in play; tap the chip to clear the selection entirely. On wide screens the chip sits in the editing panel; on phones it floats over the timer.

When more than one cell is selected:

• Settings that differ across the selection show Multiple instead of a value. Changing one writes it to every selected cell; leaving it alone leaves each cell’s own value intact.
• Content and Condition drop out of the settings list — those are inherently per-cell.

Caution

There’s no drag-to-reorder. To move a cell, Cut it and then paste it where you want it using the + button — see Adding content.

Acting on a selection

With at least one cell selected, these commands are available:

Command	What it does
Cut	Removes the cell and puts it on the clipboard
Copy	Puts a copy of the cell on the clipboard
Save as widget	Adds the cell to your widget gallery for reuse — one cell at a time
Delete	Removes the cell

Cut and Delete are unavailable for the outermost cell, since something has to hold the layout. If you select a container and something inside it, the command applies to the container only — the child comes along with it.

On a portrait phone, Save as widget isn’t on the inline bar; it’s inside the sheet that Edit settings opens.

Adding content

+ buttons appear at every insertion point inside every row and column — before the first child, between children, and after the last. Tapping one opens an Add menu:

• Paste from clipboard — only listed when you’ve cut or copied something, and always first. Pasting empties the clipboard, so a cut cell lands exactly once. A pasted cell keeps the content it showed where you cut or copied it, unless the new spot already shows the same.
• Content — insert a text cell and pick which content item it shows.
• Column — insert an empty column (children stacked vertically).
• Row — insert an empty row (children side by side).
• Widget — open the widget gallery and drop in a complete, pre-built block.

After the new cell lands, the timer scrolls to bring it into view. A row or column isn’t stuck that way: its Direction setting changes it later, to the other one or to Auto.

Cell settings

On wide screens, tapping a setting expands its controls inline, right below the row; a chevron collapses it again. On phones, Edit settings opens the same list as a sheet. Either way the settings are listed alphabetically.

Text cells

A text cell shows one piece of content, and everything else about it is typography:

Setting	Notes
Content	Which content item the cell displays
Font	Any of about 1,900 Google Fonts, listed by popularity or A–Z and filterable by style, with a search box
Font size	2–100. This is a relative size — the timer scales the whole layout to fit the screen, so think of it as proportion, not points
Font weight	Light through black
Line spacing	1.0–2.0, for content that spans several lines like a payout list
Alignment	Left, center, or right
Font color	With a reset button to fall back to the screen’s text color
Wrap text	Lets the text wrap onto more lines where that shows the screen larger, as for a list of names. See Wrapping text to fit the screen

Rows and columns

Rows and columns arrange their children and carry all the decoration:

Setting	Notes
Direction	Row, Column, or Auto, which turns with the screen. See Rows and columns that follow the screen
Alignment	How children line up across the direction the cell runs. A row, or an Auto cell running as one, shows this as Alignment, vertical
Condition	An expression deciding whether the whole cell — and everything inside it — appears. See Scripting
Spacing	0–100, the gap between children
Spread out	Only on the outermost row or column. Fills the screen, sharing the room evenly between its children. See Spreading out to fill the screen
Padding	0–100, inside the cell’s border
Margin	0–100, outside it
Minimum width	0–2000. The cell is never narrower than this, however little it contains. 0 means no minimum
Minimum height	0–2000, the same for height
Background color
Image	A picture for this cell
Image fit	How that picture fills the cell. Only appears once the cell has an image
Border width	0–20
Border color
Corner radius	0–100
Rotation	−180° to 180°

Padding, margin, border width and the two minimums all share one scale, so they add up the way you’d expect: a cell with a minimum width of 300 and padding of 20 leaves 260 for its contents. Note that text is measured on a different scale — a font size of 20 is roughly 80 of these units tall — so minimums are usually larger numbers than the font sizes beside them.

Rows and columns that follow the screen

A row puts its children side by side and a column stacks them, on every screen. A layout that looks right on a TV can waste most of a phone held upright. Set Direction to Auto and the cell turns with the screen instead: a row on a wide screen, a column on a tall one.

An Auto cell directly inside another Auto cell goes the other way, so the two always run across each other. Inside an ordinary row or column, an Auto cell follows the screen again.

For example, the default Current level layout is a row of two columns: the timer and the results. Set Direction to Auto on both the row and the results column. A wide screen looks just as before, and on a tall one the timer sits on top, with the results side by side beneath it.

It goes by the shape of the whole screen, or of the app’s window, not by the space the cell happens to have, so the layout doesn’t flip partway through a game as a payout list grows. In edit mode you see the direction for the screen you’re editing on; rotate the device or resize the window to check the other one. An Auto cell’s Alignment switches between its vertical and horizontal choices as it turns.

The default layouts, and any you’ve customized, keep their rows and columns as they are. Set Direction to Auto on the ones you want to turn.

Note

A device still on an older version of the app shows an Auto cell the way it runs on a wide screen. Saving the layout from that device turns it back into a plain row or column.

Spreading out to fill the screen

A layout is scaled to fit the screen, so when its shape doesn’t match the screen’s, there’s room left over above and below it, or on either side. Turn on Spread out for the outermost row or column and it fills the screen in the direction it runs, sharing that room evenly before, between, and after its children. Spacing stays the smallest gap, and chips shown below or beside the layout move to the edge of the screen.

The switch only appears on the outermost row or column, the one that holds everything else, because that’s the only cell the screen gives extra room to. A column spreads its rows down a tall screen, and a row spreads its children across a wide one. The room depends on the screen, so a column spreads further on a phone held upright than on a TV.

Edit mode shows the layout without spreading it, so the change appears once you’re done editing.

Note

A device still on an older version of the app shows the layout without spreading it. Saving the layout from that device turns Spread out off.

Wrapping text to fit the screen

A text cell keeps to the lines its content gives it, however long they are. The timer scales the whole layout to fit the screen, so one long line, like the list of players at a table, makes everything on the screen small. Turn on Wrap text and the text wraps onto more lines, at the width that shows the layout largest on the screen it’s on, beside the chips, tables, and QR code.

Where another part of the layout is wider, like a large clock, the text wraps at that width. Where the text is the widest thing, it wraps where the layout best fills the screen: narrower on a phone held upright, wider on a TV. Rotating the screen, or a change in the text such as a player busting out, wraps it again.

Edit mode shows the text on its own lines, so the change appears once you’re done editing.

Note

A device still on an older version of the app shows the text on its own lines. Saving the layout from that device turns Wrap text off.

Reserving space

A cell normally shrinks to fit its contents, which means it changes size as those contents do — a payout list grows as places are paid, a conditional label appears and shoves its neighbours along. Giving the cell a Minimum width or Minimum height holds its footprint steady, so the rest of the layout stops shifting underneath it.

The cell still grows past the minimum if its contents need the room; the minimum is a floor, not a fixed size. When contents are smaller than the floor, the leftover space is distributed according to the cell’s Alignment.

Images

Note

There is no separate “image cell”. An image is a property of a row or column, so to place one you add a row or column and give it an image.

The Image setting offers Manage cloud images to reuse pictures you’ve already uploaded, and Upload image to add a new one. Uploading your own images requires a subscription; without one the upload action shows a lock.

An image behaves one of two ways, depending on what else is in the cell:

• Behind other cells. If the row or column has children, the image sits behind them as a backdrop, and the children decide how big the cell is.
• On its own. If the cell has no children, the image is the content — this is how you place a club logo or a sponsor badge.

A cell showing only an image needs a Minimum width or Minimum height, because a picture on its own has no size to give the cell. Set just one of the two and the other follows the image’s shape, so a logo keeps its proportions: give it a minimum width of 400 and the height works itself out.

Whenever the cell’s shape is decided by something other than the picture — both minimums set, or a backdrop sized by the cells in front of it — Image fit settles the mismatch:

Fit	What it does
Cover	Fills the whole cell, cropping whatever overflows. Best for backdrops
Contain	Fits the picture entirely inside the cell, leaving space on two sides if the shapes differ. Best for logos
Fill	Stretches the picture to the cell exactly, distorting it if the shapes differ

Tip

For a logo, set one minimum and leave the other at 0. The cell takes the picture’s own shape, so there’s nothing to crop or stretch and Image fit doesn’t come into it.

Chips, tables, and QR code widgets

The Chips, Tables, and QR code widgets from the gallery are cells of their own. With nothing inside to arrange, they have no Direction, Alignment, Spacing, or Image, and no + buttons. Everything else works as on a row or column, and the two minimums decide their size.

Conditions

A row or column with a Condition only appears when that condition is true, which is how a payout block stays out of the way until money has been collected. Leave it empty and the cell always shows.

The condition editor has syntax highlighting and completion, shows what the expression currently evaluates to, and rejects anything that isn’t true or false. The { } button in its app bar opens the Script explorer, which lists every value you can reference along with its current value.

See Scripting for the language, and Tournament data for the full list of values.

Saving: one level, or all of them

A layout starts out the same on every level, so tapping Save applies your change to all of them.

It can also differ per level — something calm during breaks, something busier during blind levels. To allow that, open the tournament’s Settings screen, turn on Advanced settings, and turn on Allow custom content per level or level type. Save then asks how far the change should reach in this layout with an Update: menu:

• this level — only the level you’re looking at
• all blind levels, all break levels, or all pregame levels — every level of that type
• all levels — the whole tournament

The menu also appears with that setting off, in a layout where a level or a type of level already has its own content. Tournaments brought over from the old app often do.

Caution

Choosing all levels when individual levels already have their own layouts replaces those layouts. The app warns you first with an Apply to all levels? confirmation.

Cancelling the Update menu doesn’t lose your work — you stay in edit mode with the draft intact.

Starting over

Both live in the Customize menu, and both are covered on the Timer display page:

• Reset to defaults lists exactly what you’ve customized in the layout that’s showing, so you can reset one thing, or all of it.
• Import layouts replaces this tournament’s layouts with another tournament’s, which beats rebuilding a layout you already like.