How are tiles laid out?

[cmderden79]

I have seen a topic or two on this, but I still get some odd tile movements when switching between devices. I understand that different resolutions and size will change some things, but this example kinda befuddles me.

First shot is of my tablet dashboard (this was after I fixed it back to this layout when I got home and saw it was wrong). So today I figured I would check and see what affect changing the tablet had on the PC. Second shot is how the dashboard opens in Chrome. With such a simple dashboard (5 dashboard tiles and 1 media tile) and with both devices having plenty of room for these tiles, and with the tiles being all the way to the left and the top, why would this not show up the same on both?

[cmderden79]

I should follow up with that I have seen that I can change the settings in google to reflect my tablet, and of course I do understand this if there were some pretty intricate arrangments/layouts, but for this situation I cannot see what would make those three tiles move to the right when they are perfectly fine on the screen where they should be. Nothing should make them move over.

[josh]

Thanks for the feedback, @cmderden79! Check out the following post for more details:

How To: Designing Dashboards for a Tablet from a Laptop / PC

@Devin_Morell thanks for posting! The tiles on SharpTools dashboards will automatically reflow based on the screen width. If you’re looking to have tiles line up a certain way on a certain device, we recommend designing the dashboard for your target device size. For anyone who is finding this via search, the feedback in this post applies to the legacy Reflowing Dashboards. Creating a new dashboard will default to using Scalable Dashboards making it easier to use the same dashboard …

Tiles flow from left-to-right, top-to-bottom. So if the browser width is different, the dashboard might be able to fit a different number of tiles in each row and thus the tiles be positioned differently. Judging from the screenshots (which appear to be slightly different crops), the second screenshot is slightly wider than the first and it’s probably just enough room to allow at least one extra tile wide, so the tiles flow slightly differently.

[cmderden79]

Yeah that is the post I was referring to having read, and I do understand. Yet, it does seem like there should be a method for when building a standard Upper left hand corner to right, or down (sorry crummy explanation there) that those tiles could lock in those spots on all devices. Probably what seems “simple” to a laymen is far more involved in the real world, which is why I titled this as an enhancement opportunity rather than “WHY THE HECK>>>” lol.

[josh]

Thanks! We’ve made note of your feedback in the linked thread.

@josh

We’ve been thinking about a concept of a fixed ‘canvas’ that would scale with your browser. Community feedback is a key part of how we prioritize what we work on, so I appreciate your feedback!

@cmderden79

I third the motion for a fixed canvas.