Nestable.dev – Local Whiteboard App with Nestable Canvases, Deep Links

All the usual obsidian goodies work as expected.

I do like this app though. Great tool for preparing presentations to explain things and probably also great whiteboarding tool (company uses figma for that and it is beyond annoying!).

Zooming in to reveal things will only make it more ambiguous since the right depth at which we hide away content will vary based on the content.

We can more intuitively build this with nestable using deep links. Each layer/level can be shown in one canvas and a deeplink to another canvas that captures a more granular level of any of the components would be a much scalable and generic approach.

Maybe on a smaller scale, it would be manageable though. I remember seeing some presentations that use Prezi and that has the ability to nest text at different zoom levels, and the transitions between slides worked pretty well and you did still have a sense of place, but the presenters didn't have tons of content all over like in the youtube link. I wish I had a link handy for the Prezi presentation I saw online because some of them were structured like your description about different zoom levels, like a fractal.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GblI7GI0jQ4&t=85s

[1] https://contexts.online

[1] https://www.endlesspaper.app/

[2] https://infinitecanvas.tools/

I used to make entire presentations, systems diagrams, story boards, etc all using scale as a meaningful piece of information. You could go way overboard with it but it was really great. (We used to have a saying "Your Prezi is making me dizzy" for folks that overdid the flying nature)

Biggest challenge to me is the UX and navigating the relationships between entities (systems, components/modules, classes, functions, read/write memory, etc) requires a lot of design effort around how they work together consistently at all levels. Conceptually, your view is a set of boxes that are a filter/group-by over a lot of entities at some level, and you want to explode only some of those entities. eg. say you want to zoom into a micro-service's component level, but still see external APIs, which could be a single box per API or boxes for each endpoint. So the control you need over the way zooming works and the 'lens' over relationships filter/group-bys can easily become very complex; probably a good research project itself though!

I do think it's possible to build a good interface that would allow viewing from global cloud scale systems and right into the code through multiple paths, like design patterns/components or git repos with files/folders, but I'm not sure how nice it's going to be to use. There's a reason UML modelling didn't stick around. And I'm not sure there's enough of a business case to fund it, but I'll definitely keep hoping to see it some day.

Nestable approach with canvas management is more similar to notion than muse.

Nestable also has deep linking across the app so that you can leave hyperlinks to other pages or shapes from anywhere to enable better organisation and management.

Canvases aren't generally used as knowledge bases because more often than not, it gets really hard navigating them and nestable wishes to solve that.

In terms of making a business of out nestable, I have no plans for it. This is fully local and the only charge I incur would be for hosting which is very minimal.

Nestable enables nesting at page management level and encourages deep links to connect things between canvases. This approach has proven to be much more scalable in all of my workflows

1. Tldraw support of embedded canvases it not great when you are power using 2. You can open the sidebar from clicking the page name in the center top of the canvas 3. Initially I had the sidebar be a side component that pushes the canvas to the right but the change in aspect ratio was jarring because I was constantly opening and closing the sidebar 4. Made with tldraw is mentioned on the right bottom of the canvas. I am not trying to hide it in any way.