Adding scripting to Trunk Notes makes it even more powerful. Users can now do things in Trunk Notes that could previously only be done in desktop editors. Whilst this is only a starting point there are still lots of things to play with.

The scripting language built into Trunk Notes is Lua, a language ideal for embedding into applications. It is a very small, fast and powerful language which is easy to use and has lots of exciting features. Check out the Lua website for more information.

To whet your appetite here are a couple of examples of Lua scripts in Trunk Notes.

Day/Night example

There are a number of users who have experimented with JavaScript solutions to have Trunk Notes automatically switch between two stylesheets depending on the time of day.

Using the new Lua scripting it becomes possible to do this much more easily – and elegantly.

In my Header page, which gets included in every document, I add a call to a Lua script which will include the relevant stylesheet:

{{lua DayNight.lua}}

This will run the commands contained in the page DayNight.lua and insert the result into the current page.

Here is my DayNight.lua page:

hour = tonumber(os.date('%H'))
if hour < 7 or hour > 20 then
    return "{{stylesheet Night.css}}"
else
    return "{{stylesheet Day.css}}"
end

As you can see anything returned from Lua is treated as Markdown and included at the point where the script was called.

Manipulating the wiki

What you couldn’t do in JavaScript, even if you tried really really hard, was create new wiki entries. This is now almost trivial. An example:

-- Create a new wiki page (if this page already exists the new_page will be nil)
new_page = wiki.new('MyNewPage')
-- Put the date in the contents of the page
new_page.contents = os.date()
-- Tag this as Journal and Lua (tags are created if necessary)
new_page.tags = {'Journal', 'Lua'}
-- Save the page
wiki.save(new_page)
-- Return the page name
return new_page.title

There are also Lua functions for searching the wiki, getting lists of tags and retrieving existing pages. Arguments can be passed to scripts, e.g. {{lua ExampleScript.lua, argument 1, argument 2}} and retrieved through the args array.

Scratching the surface

I’m looking forward to see what new and innovative uses the Trunk Notes community makes of Lua scripting. Trunk Notes 2.6.0 is going through some final testing now before it is submitted to Apple next week (probably).

Keep having fun with Trunk Notes – stay productive!

(Lua scripting will play a big part in making Trunk Notes for Mac a powerful wiki to have on your desktop. Watch this space!)

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.

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

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.

The first step is to put Trunk Notes into Wi-Fi Sharing mode. Simply tap the action button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, and select Wi-Fi Sharing.

You will be given a web address to enter into your web browser on a computer on the same network. For me the address is http://192.168.1.110:10000

If you are asked for a username and password, and haven’t changed it in the Settings app, enter trunk and password.

To upload a file click the Upload button.

You will now be given the opportunity to choose the file to upload. Once you have done this click Upload File.

When the file has been successfully uploaded you will be given the rather terse message ‘OK’. (This feature needs a little more work before it is made properly public in the manual!)

If now look at the list of pages in your wiki a new one will have been created representing the file. Tapping that entry will show you a thumbnail. Tap the thumbnail to view the whole of the file.

All of the old blog articles have been imported. However there are a few issues with images in older articles. Hopefully this will be fixed sometime soon. If you spot anything else which isn’t quite right please let me know.

The idea was to make links to wiki pages stand out more and be more easily distinguishable from web links.

Some emails have suggested that the old, cleaner, theme should be reintroduced – or at least there should be an easy way to switch between them.

In case you aren’t sure what I’m talking about here is the old theme (on the left) vs the new theme (on the right):

The wiki page links are now highlighted in yellow surrounded by a rounded border. Top level titles have an underline, and the default font has changed from Arial to Trebuchet MS.

If you are someone who thinks the new style should be scrapped let me know! If you think it is an improvement let me know!

You can revert the style by turning on the custom stylesheet. To do this carry out the following steps:

1. Tap on the Settings app (from the home screen with all your apps on)
2. Scroll down until you find the settings for Trunk Notes
3. Turn on “Custom Stylesheet”
4. Double tap the (physical) home button on your device
5. Hold down your finger on Trunk Notes then tap the – indicator button
6. Go back into Trunk Notes and in the search bar type Special:SetStyleSheet
7. Edit the page
8. Remove all the text
9. Paste the old stylesheet text into the page, then click Save. (The old stylesheet text is at the end of this blog post)

So if you detest the new style and want the simpler look of Trunk Notes 2.5.2 it is (fairly) easy to switch back. If I get enough comments pointing to the new style being horrible then I will bring back the old style in the next version of Trunk Notes.

Old stylesheet text:

body {
    font: medium Arial;
    font-size:16px;
    background-color: white;
    margin:0;
}

h1 {
    font-weight: bold;
    font-size: 20px;
}

h2 {
    font-weight: bold;
    font-size: 18px;
}

h3 {
    font-weight: bold;
    font-size: 16px;
}

#info {
    font: medium Arial;
    background: #CFCFCF;
    font-size: 12px;
    padding-left: 4px;
    margin-bottom: 0px;
    padding-top: 2px;
    padding-bottom: 2px;
    height: 14px;
}

.highlight {
    background-color: yellow;
}

.highlight-selected {
    background-color: red;
}

#contents {
    margin-top: 0px;
    padding-left: 8px;
    padding-right: 8px;
}

table {
    margin: 1em;
    border-collapse: collapse;
    width: 90%;
}

td, th {
    padding: .3em;
    border: 1px #ccc solid;
}

thead {
    background: #ccc;
}

a {
    text-decoration: none;
}

a.wiki-link {
    text-decoration: underline;
    border-bottom: none;
}

a.missing-wiki-link {
    color: red;
}

html {
    -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
}

Excitedly I saw a plugin for OmniOutliner to do exactly that – http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/. After a little playing I was impressed by all the features and the information available on the site and in the user’s guide. However the opml2mmd tool only included the first column. My reason for using OmniOutliner was the support for multiple columns.

OmniOutliner can export in a variety of formats. One of the simplest is Plain Text with tabs. This includes all the columns and even the column headings. Five minutes later I had a little Python script which easily handles my OmniOutliner document and converts it into sensibly formatted Markdown. I want columns two and above to appear as a bulleted list underneath the heading.

Here is an example OmniOutliner document (not the one I was working with, but it has the same format):

As you can see I have three columns, and have included a note. I now export the document in the format Plain Text (with tabs) and run my Python script. Here is the resulting Markdown:

The Python script is very quick and dirty (no error handling or proper command line arguments):

#!/usr/bin/env python

"""
Convert an export OmniOutliner (plain text with tabs) document to Markdown

@author: Matthew Kennard <mgkennard@appsonthemove.com>
"""

import sys

outline_path = sys.argv[1]

lines = open(outline_path).readlines()
column_headings = lines[0].strip().split('t')

for line in lines[1:]:
    # Get number of tabs at the start
    tabs = 0
    for c in line:
        if c != 't':
            break
        tabs += 1
    # Remove the tabs
    line = line.strip('t')
    if line.startswith('- '):
        # A branch
        line = line[2:]
        line = line.strip()
        if not line:
            continue
        columns = line.split('t')
        print '%s %s' % ('#' * (tabs + 1), columns[0])
        print
        for i, column_heading in enumerate(column_headings[1:]):
            column_n = i + 1
            if column_n < len(columns):
                print ' * %s: %s' % (column_headings[column_n], columns[column_n], )
        print
    else:
        # A note
        print line.strip()

I’m now happy that I can export my OmniOutliner planning documents and have them available on my iPhone in Trunk Notes.

The beauty of open formats (such as plain text or OPML which OmniOutliner also supports) is the ease with which you can convert your data for use in other applications. If you use Trunk Notes with other applications let me know!

Thankfully times have changed and now it’s all about interoperability. Most modern programs, particularly on the Mac, make use of open file formats and offer multiple ways in which data can be exported. Many people steer well clear of programs which lock data in. With the rate of innovation who in their right mind would spend time building up a vital store of data in an app from which there is no way out?

Plain text is the ultimate in open file formats. A text file is something that can be viewed without the need for any software over and above what comes with your operating system. It’s also hard to think of a modern system which won’t also allow you to edit text files out of the box (just don’t try using Notepad on Windows and expect sanity!)

It’s often the case that once you introduce formatting of text (bold, italics, different sizes of font) you lose the ability to use plain text. The rise though of simple mark up languages – Markdown, Textile, … – provide an opportunity to keep things simple and still use plain text. The great thing about Markdown and other similar syntaxes is that most examples are perfectly readable even if you don’t know what Markdown is or that the text is anything other than plain text. After a while writing in Markdown becomes second nature.

Who would have trouble reading the following?

# To do lists

Stuff to do at the weekend:

 * Research buying a new car

 * Buy food for Saturday dinner party

 * Clean **toilet** and bath

Trunk Notes stores it’s text data internally in an SQLite database. However you can quickly export all your wiki pages as individual text files. You can also sync text files to a Dropbox account. Images, sounds and other files can be retrieved via iTunes File Sharing or again via Dropbox. Of course I hope that Trunk Notes users never feel the need to move to another app – but if they do then it should be very simple to get their data out of Trunk Notes in a sensible format.

In summary make sure that the apps and programs you trust with your notes and other data don’t stop you from migrating your information somewhere else in the future.