Apps On The Move Forum

by **illium** » Wed Dec 15, 2010 6:12 pm

TrunkNotes for iPad has been a welcome discovery! For a few years now, I've collected notes in a Markdown proto-Wiki on my Mac, based on Markdown+Smartypants / Discount, and held together by a bit of homebrew Ruby scripting and a TextMate snippet that updates the corresponding .html file when I save a .markdown file.

Based on two months of overall very positive experience using TrunkNotes on the iPad and experimentally migrating my work to it, here are some enhancements that I'd especially welcome (in roughly descending order of importance to me):

1. I love the ability to specify my own custom stylesheets. If the HTML wrapper TrunkNotes generates could automatically embed the page name as an "id" value -- for example, a page called "ProjectIdeas" could be wrapped in `<body id="ProjectIdeas">` -- that would enable me to customize my styling on a per-page basis. Similarly, the Tags attached to a page could be useful as "class" names (possibly distinguished by a prefix?) -- e.g. if the "ProjectIdeas" page had tags "Work" and "Future", the markup could be `<body id="ProjectIdeas" class="TagWork TagFuture">` or something like that. Either or both of these simple additions would add great page-styling power! (Much easier to maintain a single stylesheet, and allow it to contain per-page customization rules.)

2. A way to embed Markdown-processed text within block-level HTML tags would be great. In my homebrew system, I treat lines that start with "%" as escaped, and pass them straight through to the HTML output instead of passing them through Markdown. This lets me do things like:

%<div class="sidebar">
This text *will* be processed by [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/).
%</div>

Discount offers the "Class blocks" syntax extension, but I'd find a simple passthrough like the above much simpler and more flexible/powerful. (I noticed, by the way, that a recent TrunkNotes update seems to have enabled Discount's syntax extension for creating HTML <table>s -- handy and much appreciated!)

3. TrunkNotes deserves a first-class sync experience. Something akin to the simplicity and performance I get with Cultured Code's "Things" is what I'm thinking. I suspect there's some slowness inherent in the Python Bonjour library you're using, as Bonjour is certainly capable of much faster device detection and service resolution when programmed natively via Obj-C. Maybe that issue can be fixed without having to move off Python. A polished sync UI would be nice too (including a warning on the TrunkNotes Wireless Sharing panel that warns me not to close when a sync is in progress), but the slowness of syncing is the main practical issue. Syncing to keep my work current and backed up should be something I'm not discouraged from doing often. Filename mapping to native types would be handy too -- i.e. each note file should sync to a ".markdown" or ".mdown" or ".md" file on my Mac, each CSS stylesheet (maybe identified in TrunkNotes by having a "CSS" name suffix, or by some other convention?) should sync to a .css file on my Mac, etc.

4. A visual browser for the images in my TrunkNotes wiki, as a better alternative to browsing the list of "File:..." pages, would be a great improvement, along with an "Image From TrunkNotes" item for the "Insert..." submenu, that brings up that browser to let me select an existing imported image just as easily as I can select one from my iPad's photo library.

Thanks for listening, and for a great app with a promising future!

Apps On The Move Forum

styling, sync, and image browsing enhancements

styling, sync, and image browsing enhancements

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