Christmas is approaching and so is a new release of Trunk Notes. It is currently in the Apple approval queue along with countless apps for the holiday season – which is why it’s not quite on the App Store yet.

There are four main changes in this release. Two new functions and some custom stylesheet enhancements.

The new functions are prefix and search. These allow you to search for and display lists of matching pages.

Lets say you want a list on your HomePage of all pages whose title starts with Meeting. Simply add {{prefix Meeting}}. If you use namespaces to separate parts of your wiki this can be used to create mini contents pages for each section.

The second new function is search. As you might guess this produces a list of notes by searching the notes for a specific word or phrase. For example {{search Trunk Notes}} will give you a list of all pages containing the phrase “Trunk Notes”.

The other two changes are both related to CSS. CSS is how web pages (and pages in your Trunk Notes wiki) determine what styling (fonts, colours, etc) to use.

The first change is how the {{stylesheet}} function works. In previous versions of Trunk Notes if you wanted to specify a stylesheet for use on a particular page, e.g. {{stylesheet HomePageStylesheet}} then that stylesheet had to include all of the stylesheet information needed to display the page sensibly. This was true even if all you wanted to do was change the font to be slightly larger. In 2.5.7 {{stylesheet}} adds the styles on top of the main stylesheet.

For example if I wanted on my HomePage to make the font smaller so that more information could fit I could create a new page called HomePageStylesheet and in that add the text:

body {

    font-size: 14px;

}

Then add {{stylesheet HomePageStylesheet}} somewhere in HomePage. This makes it much easier to create styles to be used only on specific pages.

Related to this change is the ability to define styles which get applied to pages with certain tags. If you have a page with the tag “Large Font” you can now use a CSS class .tag-largefont to define how you want the content to look. For example:

body.tag-largefont {

    font-size: 18px;

}

Hopefully Trunk Notes 2.5.7 will be in the App Store any day now – as soon as Apple have reviewed all of the Christmas Cracker apps sitting ahead of it in the queue!

A quick post about IconProject and how you can use it with Trunk Notes. IconProject is an app which allows you to add icons to your iPhones home screen which launch URLs (no jail breaking required!) The URLs can be any URL you want, include the special URLs to Trunk Notes pages.

The app is easy to use and creates really nice looking icons.

In the above screenshot I used it to create an icon which takes me straight to my passwords note.

You can link to any Trunk Notes page. A link to a Trunk Notes page starts with tn://. As well as normal pages you can also use URLs to create new pages.

• tn://Special:NewText
• tn://Special:NewImage
• tn://Special:NewCamera

It’s quite cool to be able to have an icon on your homepage which takes a picture with the camera and adds it straight into your personal wiki.

More information about IconProject

Unlike many note taking apps Trunk Notes forces you to give each page a name. That is because Trunk Notes, at it’s heart, is a personal wiki. The power of a personal wiki comes from the ability to link named pages together. Having good names for pages makes this easier and more natural.

Page names are also used to help find information quickly. The search bar in Trunk Notes works by matching what you type against existing page names. Start typing ‘blog’ and all pages which start with Blog will be listed with the most recently modified at the top.

Prefixing page names can be a helpful way to organise wiki entries. I am writing this blog post in Trunk Notes on my iPad. It’s name is ‘BlogNamingPages’. All my other blog posts also start with Blog. To find all my blog posts ordered by when they were written I just type Blog in the search bar. I don’t do this for all pages, just those where searching is quite common – this includes recipes.

One aspect of Trunk Notes which some new users find awkward is the “no spaces in page names” rule. This was an early design decision and it’s aim is to make it easier to refer to pages. You can still create links which contain spaces, for example [[Blog naming pages]] will show as written but still refer to the page BlogNamingPages. Trunk Notes makes this rule easy to follow by enforcing it. If you type “my new page name” Trunk Notes will correct it to “MyNewPageName”.

Most of the time you should give your page an explicit name when creating it. The exception is if you are using Trunk Notes for journalling or another activity where having the current date as the name is acceptable. If you tap the Action button and then use New… to create a page you will find that the name of the page is the current date. The format for this is taken from the timestamp settings.

In summary, names are very important in Trunk Notes. Think about page names carefully and you will be rewarded by information which is easy to link together and search.