I’ve been mentioning a desktop version of Trunk Notes for Mac for some time now. Work has started, although is progressing a little slower than many of you would like. I thought a quick update on the current status of this project would be worth posting about – hopefully to reassure some of you that this is happening!

I want to keep the desktop version as simple as possible – whilst offering all of the power that Trunk Notes offers in iOS. Every page in your wiki will be represented by a plain text file on your computer. There are no propritory formats, no data lock in. If you need to use your information in something other than Trunk Notes then that will be made as easy as possible.

Here is what Trunk Notes for Mac currently looks like when started:

Most of the interface is taken up with the current page being used. When searching the wiki a pane opens with the search results. At the moment just the page name is displayed, however other information will be shown in the final release. As with the iOS version searching happens as you type. Here you can see that the word Journal is being searched for – and a number of wiki entries match.

You can quickly switch between viewing the rendered page and the Markdown. A keyboard shortcut or a click on Markdown will switch to that view. When you switch back again or choose a new page your changes are saved automatically. The plan is to automatically version any changes on save.

In the window title bar you can see the proxy icon (the tiny icon next to the page name). Drag this to another application, such as TextEdit or MacVim, and the Markdown of the current page will open in that other application. This kind of data transparency isn’t seen in many other desktop note taking apps – with Trunk Notes it will always be obvious where your data is.

The current version hasn’t implemented many of the Trunk Notes functions. You can see above that the timestamp function, numnotes, tagcloud and random are not yet available. However the {{image}} function is being used to show the cat image.

The interface is designed to be similar to that of a web browser. You can click the links and use the back/forward buttons in the toolbar to navigate your history.

Here you can see that an encrypted note has been requested:

With the Easter weekend coming up I hope to implement a lot more before sending out a test version to those kind enough to volunteer for beta testing. Trunk Notes is a part time project with most of my working week devoted to the company One Result where I work on some fantastic iOS apps. However despite that in the next couple of weeks I will be added a page inspector to manipulate tags and view information about pages, additional toolbar buttons, some of the main {{ }} functions and adding pages by dragging text to the app icon.

So, still early days yet in terms of how far I’ve got – but hopefully by the summer there should be a first release of Trunk Notes for Mac.

I store many different types of note in Trunk Notes. I plan my working week, keep track of bills and jot down new app ideas.

However my most popular tag is Recipes.

The tag cloud from my HomePage

I am forever copy/pasting recipes from websites, but I also have some of my own creations.

Here is the Markdown for a simple pasta recipe I prepared and ate this evening. Since I didn’t get home until nearly 8pm and I wasn’t cooking for my girlfriend tonight this serves one person and can be ready in about 15 minutes…

SimpleMushroomChorizoPasta

Serves: 1

# Ingredients

 * 1 small onion, roughly chopped
 * 1/2 tin of chopped tomatoes
 * 1 large portobello mushroom, chopped
 * some chopped chorizo sausage
 * garlic infused olive oil
 * glug of red wine
 * some pasta
 * 1/2 teaspoon of mixed herbs
 * sea salt, pepper to taste

# Method

 1. Boil a kettle of water for the pasta
 1. In a large saucepan dry fry the chorizo sausage for a couple of minutes (might start smoking a little) - medium to high heat
 1. Add the mushroom and fry for a minute more. Make sure the mushroom is coated in the oil from the sausage
 1. Add the garlic infused olive oil and onion then saute on a lower heat for 2-3 minutes
 1. Throw the red wine into the pan together with the mixed herbs - should be bubbling
 1. Whilst the wine is being absorbed pour the hot water from the kettle into another saucepan together with some salt. Once the water is boiling nicely add the pasta and simmer for ten minutes (or whatever it tells you on the back of the packet)
 1. As soon as the pasta has been dropped into the water add the tin of chopped tomatoes to the sausage, mushrooms and onion. If you like add some salt and pepper. Stir every couple of minutes and make sure the heat isn’t too high that the sauce dries up
 1. When the pasta is ready drain all but a couple of tablespoons of the water. Toss the pasta with the sauce and serve

I apologise for “some pasta” and “some chopped chorizo sausage” – I use whatever feels appropriate for my hunger!

Snippets are a feature of Trunk Notes to help you enter text quickly on your iPhone and iPad. In this blog post I will show you how snippets can help you quickly insert the current date/time and aid your creativity.

Some characters are quicker to type than others, especially on the small keyboard on the iPhone. If you want to insert some Markdown into Trunk Notes often defining a snippet can hugely speed up text entry. For example I have a snippet with the name Snippet:l. When I type lxx (that is the snippet name, without the Snippet: prefix, and the execute text xx) Trunk Notes inserts and puts the cursor just before the >. Much quicker than switching keyboards to find all the punctuation symbols.

Trunk Notes has had support for this kind of snippet for some time. In 2.4.2 snippets were made even more powerful by allowing you to define snippets with dynamic content in which is ‘executed’ before being inserted.

Timestamps

One obvious use for this is inserting a timestamp. I can type in txx and Trunk Notes will insert the current date and time.

To create a timestamp snippet follow these steps:

1. Create a new wiki page with the name Snippet:t
2. Enter the text !!{{timestamp}} and tap Save

Now when you type txx into a note Trunk Notes will expand the dynamic content {{timestamp}} and insert the date (and time depending on your settings) into your note. Without the !! Trunk Notes would just insert the text {{timestamp}}.

To create a custom timestamp you can supply arguments to the timestamp function.

Here are some examples:

• !!{{timestamp yyyy dd/MM}} might insert 2011 10/02 (that is year day/month)
• !!{{timestamp HH:mm}} for 21:52 (hour:minute)
• !!{{timestamp EEEE}} for Thursday (the day name)

The timestamp function is really flexible. For full details on what all the codes are you can use see unicode.org.

Randomness

Here is something you might find fun (or maybe even useful if you are a creative type.)

If you are writing something and are stuck for the ideal word to use why not have Trunk Notes pick one for you at random.

The first task is to come up with a list of words which you want Trunk to pick from at random. I created a page called Adjectives and added the following (you may want to use a much longer list):

adorable

average

bright

gleaming

magnificent

prickly

repulsive

teeny-tiny

yummy

I then created my snippet. I called it Snippet:adj (so I can then type in adjxx and have my random word inserted). Snippet:adj contains the following text:

!!{{random Adjectives}}

Now whenever I type in adjxx Trunk Notes will insert a random adjective. Excellent if you use adorable magnificent Trunk Notes for writing short stories or poems!

How might you use !! ??

These are just two suggestions for using the !! snippets feature. If you find a cool use of !! let us know in the comments or start a forum thread.

Trunk Notes 2.4.2 has just been submitted to Apple for approval. Assuming they find no issues I would expect it to be available for purchase/upgrade in the next 7-14 days.

The changes in this release include:

• Use TextExpander snippets in the page bar
• On upgrade view list of new features and bug fixes
• Create a header and footer to be included on all pages using Special:Header and Special:Footer pages
• Display snippets as plain text, not as Markdown
• Add !! at the start of a snippet and all functions will be evaluated before the text is substituted
• Hide Special: and Docs: wiki entries from list of all pages
• Markdown syntax helper actions when selecting text
• Don’t include Special:DropboxSync in backlinks
• Minor improvements to wi-fi sharing interface
• Markdown improvements, including easy ~~strikethrough~~ support
• You can now select text and apply bold, italic, strikethrough and link from the select text menu
• Search results are now shown sorted by most recently edited page
• Fixed: Issues when Dropbox syncing to a subfolder
• Fixed: Inserting images on iPad
• Fixed: Changing tags now causes last updated time to update
• Fixed: Issues with some links containing /WikiWords
• Fixed: Tag Cloud issues when tag names contain international characters