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NestNote

11/05/2026

NestNote is a passion project: a place to capture what matters about kids, pets, and daily life—so caregivers see the same picture you do. Schedules, sensitivities, “works for us” habits, and the little things that are easy to forget all belong in one note you can hand off without a long briefing.

Why it exists

Parents juggle a lot of context: different caregivers, school days vs weekends, dietary quirks, sleep cues, medication times, and the emotional temperature of a household. NestNote is meant to reduce the mental load of re-explaining that context every time someone new steps in—or every time you’re running on three hours of sleep.

Check out the various things that are fun & cool that I’ve built for it below:

Splash Screen

I took inspiration here from the Apple Invites app, but saw a unique opportunity to show the user a little bit of what the app is about. Starting with some screenshots, some entries, some codes, a routine, etc. It gives the user a nice introduction to what they can expect! The background of the screen shifting with the images scrolling is a nice touch, if you ask me!

Onboarding survey

From the get-go, I wanted an onbaording survey to gain insight into what the users wanted. Surveys are driven by JSON, results stored in Firebase, queryable in real-time to keep track of who’s signing up and what is important to them. Having different components for multi-select answers and single-select answers makes it really quick to build a survey that is open ended.

The emoji explosion is meant to bring a bit of whimsy to the flow, which is also featured in different parts of the app when something exciting happens!!

Creating a Nest

I wanted the onboarding to really culminate in a grand crescendo; making the Nest Creation step a little more special than any other step in the flow. The flow finishes with a pseudo invite card popping up from offscreen, paired with a bigger explosion (bigger = better) of emojis!

I also built a little slider component as an homage to the original iPhone locksreen; slide to enter the app once and for all! See the little shimmer?

Not seen in the video, the haptics that are paired with the explosion, and the mini haptics that play with the progress of the slide to enter!

Button Identity

Apps that care about craft usually develop a button language you recognize instantly—Duolingo is the reference I keep coming back to: taps that really feel like they land, with that sink-into-the-screen motion before the button springs back.

I wanted the same kind of through-line for NestNote: one system I could reuse everywhere, so interactions feel consistent rather than one-off.

It starts with touchDown and touchUp micro-animations, each paired with a haptic (unless the tap is quick enough that a single haptic covers both).

From there, the button animates in spinners to illustrate progress: spinners then morph into success or failure symbols when a task completes. Spinner speed is part of the design too—how fast it spins changes how long the wait feels.

The last layer is immediate feedback: the label flips to something like “Copied!” when you grab a code, then animates back to showing the code again.

I tuned the curves in Couverture—an excellent app for dialing in timing & easing curves before it hits the device.

NestNote Sheet Interactions

Truthfully the first place I started with this app was experimenting with custom presentations & dismissals of viewControllers because I thought it was interesting. It ended up evolving into a system that is used all over for all sorts of data entry!

Creating plain entries, adding contacts, & listing out a routine (& more) all follow a familiar experience built off of these sheets.

Being the smart developer that I am, I’ve got a superclass that shares all the presentation logic (obviously) but also shares all of the common elements that are consistently found in the sheets. The titles, the menu, the close button, while keeping it flexible enough to be context specific along the bottom of individual sheets. Special buttons for importing contacts or choosing the frequency of a routine.

This sheet interaction was featured on the infamous Spotted in Prod. I’m proud of that!

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