Trunk Notes sync between iPhone and Mac/PC
Don’t get too excited, I am not announcing a polished application for Mac/PC to sync with Trunk Notes on your iPhone. Also a quick warning that this blog post is fairly technical. Feel free to stop reading at any time!
Unfortunately as a part time iPhone developer I haven’t had as much time as I would like to fully develop such a program. My intention to rewrite in Java has met the stumbling block of not having written any Java for eight years and a lack of time to refresh my knowledge of the language - a poor excuse I know! There are lots of features still to add to Trunk Notes and I am working on the next version at the moment. It’s also about time I developed a new app - maybe something not quite as geeky ;o)
Read More...Go Calc Press Release
Why I need my own iPad before I start developing apps for it
I’m sure lots of developers out there are busy creating iPad apps, or at least adapting their existing iPhone apps for this new device.
I have yet to make up my mind what the iPad is or will be. I know that I want one, as a consumer. I can envisage using it for activities such as relaxing in the living room, watching TV and surfing the web, and maybe flicking through one of these new iPad magazines. I can see at work it could be a cool note taking device during meetings. Showing photos to friends and family also features in my musings.
As for how this form factor will be used for productivity apps such as Go Calc and Trunk Notes i’m not yet sure. To be honest I don’t think Go Calc is a good fit for this device at all (if you disagree though let me know!) However brain dumping thoughts, recording and retrieving information will certainly be iPad territory.
Maybe I lack imagination. I have convinced myself that I need to have one of these devices, to touch it, to play with it, to swipe and gesture, before I can really understand how they are best to be used. I don’t want to spend time making tweaks or adapting apps without a full understanding of the device that will be running them. As such I will be waiting until I have my own iPad before reaching for Xcode and creating something to run on it.
So if any of you are wondering whether Trunk Notes will be redesigned for the iPad the answer is watch this space. I don’t want to do a straight port. I will want to think carefully and creatively about the new possibilities offered by the iPad before jumping in.
Getting Things Done with Trunk Notes
First a confession, I am too disorganised for GTD, or at least for proper GTD. I have the book, but have only read the first half. I want to, plan to, finish the rest - but haven’t got around to doing it yet.
However despite this I have implemented features in Trunk Notes to aid people who have finished the book and use GTD to make them more effective.
The GTD in Trunk was inspired by a guy, Pierre Lemay, who wrote a great post on the forum. He advised me on how his system of using a personal wiki for GTD might work in Trunk Notes.
As I said above I don’t use GTD, or at least not properly; maybe someday, but not now. However I thought I would let you know how I use the features to be a little more organised.
In Trunk Notes I have lots of pages. Many of them concerning ideas for current or future iPhone apps and some for general life stuff such as paying bills.
Whenever I need to do something as part of a project I add an action to that project or ideas page. An action in Trunk Notes is just a keyword which appears at the start of a line. The encouraged convention is to prefix the action name with a @.
Here is some examples of ‘actions’:
@action 16/02/2010 Sister’s birthday - must buy present!
@action 23/02/2010 (1) Send engineering plan to CEO
These two actions have some additional information. The first one has a date, when my sister’s birthday is. The second has a date and a priority, with 1 meaning top priority.
For those of who do GTD properly you might decide to use the keywords as contexts - for example, @errand, @phone, @internet. That’s too complicated for me, I just use @action for most things.
These ‘actions’ can be scattered throughout your wiki. Now comes the clever part.
To get an overview of what actions I need to complete I add a little bit of dynamic content to my home page.
{{dueinnext 7, @action}}
What this does is scan my entire wiki and works out what actions I have to complete in the next 7 days. It also includes an actions which haven’t yet been completed.
I also have a page which lists all of my actions. On this page I just have
{{action @action}}
This lists all actions including those without a date or priority.
When I have completed an action I change the @action to @done. This allows me to have a ‘done’ page which uses {{action @done}} to display all the things I have completed.
One thing I have simplified in the above description is that actually I don’t have the {{dueinnext 7, @action}} on my home page. I have it in the page Special:Badge. The home page features the command {{include Special:Badge}}. Using Special:Badge updates the badge on Trunk Notes with how many actions I need to complete in the next week.
I hope you are now encouraged to become more organised and make use of Trunk Notes actions. If you want to do GTD properly read Pierre’s forum post. However even for those of us lacking the discipline needed to do things properly ‘actions’ in Trunk Notes can still be very helpful.
Go Calc and , as a decimal place
A user today reported a problem with Go Calc. It turns out that I forgot that many European countries use a , as a decimal point. The calculator in Go Calc gets a little confused by this and seems to incorrectly round some numbers.
This will be an easy fix and will be submitted to Apple by the end of the week. So if you have sometimes been confused by what Go Calc is doing when you are using the keypad be confused no longer.