Many of the minor bugs and issues were due to code that was first written in February 2009 still being in place – code no longer fit for purpose when running on iOS 5 and 6. Trunk Note originally ran on iOS 3.2 – and Apple has changed many things in that time. Thankfully my list of things to finish off now has only five or six minor items. A beta will be sent out in the next couple of weeks. I’m not anticipating it being long after that before a release is submitted to Apple.

Most of the work has been behind the scenes – and may only be noticeable to those of you frustrated by lack of iPhone 5 support, occasional toolbar weirdness on the iPad and other such issues. However I’ve also started a minor refresh of the user interface. Trunk Notes has never been about wowing you with skeuomorphic interfaces – rather it has been about giving you a powerful base on which to store information in a mobile personal wiki. I’ve also been taking the opportunity to tighten how words are used in the interface. The concept of notes is gone – where appropriate wiki pages are referred to as pages, which is what they are. Creating a new page is now much more obvious for new users.

Once released I should then be able to power ahead with many of the features those of you in the Trunk Notes community have been suggesting over the past couple of years.

Here are some screenshots (on an iPhone 5 and iPad) of what things will look like in Trunk Notes 3:

There is now a new page in your Trunk Notes wiki called Special:AdvancedSettings. In here you can set/change variables which are used to modify how Trunk Notes works. A little like about:config in Firefox. Basically it is a lazy way of me allowing people to customise Trunk Notes just that little bit more without having to create a proper interface!

At the moment the only recognised settings that can be added to Special:AdvancedSettings are editor-font-name and editor-font-size.

Here is an example of how to change the editor font to a monospaced font – very handy if you use lots of tables in your Markdown:

editor-font-name = Courier
editor-font-size = 15

Simple! The page Special:AdvancedSettings is just some lines each of which is key = value. Any line starting with a # is ignored (a common convention for comments), and any line which doesn’t properly parse is also ignored. Make sure that you get the case right – Editor-font-name wouldn’t be recognised.

Recent versions of iOS come with a surprisingly large number of fonts which can be used by any apps (certainly compared to Androids 1 font family!) A great resource I often refer to is http://iosfonts.com. It allows you to filter by iOS version, search fonts and see previews in your browser.

I will likely introduce more ways to customise Trunk Notes via Special:AdvancedSettings over time – however for now have fun modifying your editor font.

The next release will be 3.0! It won’t offer much in the way of new features, but has had parts of it extensively rewritten. Trunk Notes was the second iOS app I wrote back in February 2009. Since then much has changed, both in what is offered by iOS and my own knowledge at developing for the platform. Although much of the code for Trunk Notes is fairly well structured, some it had become confused and kept introducing and reintroducing bugs. Many of these issues were to do with layout of the UI, particularly with the toolbars, and annoyingly hard to reproduce problems when not on Wi-Fi. Instead of continually trying to patch up the code I decided on rewriting and cleaning up some of the core UI code. This isn’t quite yet finished but is getting to a state where it can be sent to some kind people who have volunteered to help test Trunk Notes 3.0.

Once I’ve released 3.0 I will be in an excellent position to push ahead with some more radical changes to the UI to bring it in line with some higher marketshare note taking apps. However don’t worry, I realise what makes Trunk Notes special and what it is that keeps you using it on your iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads. Maybe I will even have time to finish the much promised Mac version (and get beyond a prototype for Android).

It is an exciting time to be a mobile developer, and although personal wikis aren’t exactly mainstream they are very powerful tools and developing Trunk Notes is great fun. There is more than one personal wiki available for iOS – however as a mobile app Trunk Notes is arguably the most powerful, and despite my lack of marketing a search for “personal wiki iOS” on Google has Trunk Notes the first named app in the results. Hopefully 2013 will see Trunk Notes gain more momentum and reach out to more people looking to manage information on their mobile devices.

Matthew
Apps On The Move

If you are using the previous version it is probably best if you keep it around (and backup your wiki) before trying this – just in case!

Download Trunk Notes for Mac EAB 20120807

UPDATE: If you tried the 20120729 build and found searching caused a crash try updating to the 20120730 build (link at bottom of page)

I hope the above warning is dramatic enough to deter users who only want a polished, finished version of Trunk Notes for Mac. Lots of distractions such as my day job, girlfriend, Word Frazzle!, Trunk Notes for iOS, … have colluded to me missing many self imposed deadlines for getting Trunk Notes for Mac finished and released. As such I have decided to throw caution to the wind and release what I’m terming an ‘Early Access Build’. There are some (but not many) additional features to implement and already identified bugs to fix before I would call Trunk Notes for Mac 1.0 a beta, however it might be interesting for some users to have a play with a build now – and not wait another month or possibly more.

Some details about this build:

• It is sandboxed – which is great for keeping everything secure and partitioned away from the rest of your data and apps. By default all your notes are installed in the sandbox environment. If you want to store your wiki somewhere else set a default location from the preferences.
• It is developer signed. This way you know that this has come from Apps On The Move (Matthew Kennard).
• I have been using a slightly earlier build for keeping notes for a couple of months and so far haven’t had too many issues.
• It isn’t advised that you use this with Trunk Notes for iOS. However, if you really want to and are aware of the consequences (i.e. it might mess up your data), you can hook it up to use a wiki you synchronise using Dropbox. Bring up the preferences, select a custom location for the wiki, and choose the folder containing the notes/ and files/ directories. You will need to restart the Mac app to detect changes to the wiki – however Dropbox will be updated fairly quickly as soon as you save a page.
• The icon is an example of programmer art – I will be shortly commissioning an icon. However I am interested to hear what people think of the concept, rather than the execution, of the current icon.
• The only functions implemented are {{image}} and {{lua}}.
• You need to be running Mac OS X 10.7 or above. This build has only been tested on the GM version of Mountain Lion.
• Although the preferences indicate that you can change the syntax highlighting style and viewing CSS this isn’t operational in this build. It will be once I have some nice defaults created.
• Search is very basic – and the pages are listed in no particular order in the sidebar. This is the next feature I will be working on.
• The list continuation still needs a little work before its really nice to use.
• This build does not expire – however it is also completely unsupported.

Some tips on using Trunk Notes for Mac:

• Switch quickly between Markdown and HTML mode using the keyboard shortcut SHIFT+CMD+E. HTML mode and Markdown mode will be renamed to something more friendly in a later release.
• Use the keyboard shortcuts CMD+[ and CMD+] to go quickly back and forwards in the history. This works in both Markdown and HTML modes.
• CMD+L will take you directly to the search field.
• CMD+N creates a new page. Type in the page name, press return and start typing. If you are currently focused on the search field then the search text will be used as the basis for the new page name.
• To import images or PDFs files into the wiki simply drag them to the Trunk Notes icon on the dock.
• Clicking an image/PDF on the File: page will open that image/PDF in Preview.
• There are some Markdown specific editing features. For example select some text and press CMD+B to make it bold. The text stays selected so you can press CMD+B a second time to remove the bold.
• You can tag notes – bring up the inspector to see the list of tags. The tags applied to the current note will be ticked.
• If you want to open up a page in another editor simply drag the proxy icon to the icon of the other app.

Finally, what you have been waiting for, is the download link:

• Download Trunk Notes EAB 20120730 (Updated)

I look forward to your feedback. Feel free to email your comments to mgkennard@appsonthemove.com or add to the Apps On The Move forum!

Lua scripting now knows some basic information about the device it is running on. This was prompted by users asking whether they could have different CSS files for the iPad and  iPhone. With this new Lua feature it should be simple to add this with a little bit of scripting.

Here is the excerpt from the manual describing this new feature:

Lua has access to some information about the device Trunk Notes is running on. This can be useful for customizing your wiki depending on whether it is running on your iPhone or iPad.

A device table in the global environment has the following fields:

• name – e.g. Matt’s iPad
• systemName – e.g. iPhone OS
• systemVersion – e.g. 5.1.1
• model – e.g. iPad
• localizedModel – if your locale defines a different name for the device.

For example:

if device.model == "iPad" then
 return "This is an iPad!"
else
 return "This is not an iPad"
end

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