Tap in the search bar at the top of the screen. Give your new note a name (e.g. New Note). What you type in will be transformed into a valid WikiWord. Trunk Notes will present you with the option of creating a note with this name. Either tap on “Create page ‘New Note’” or tap the Go button on the keyboard.
Alternatively putting a WikiWord into a note and then tapping it will create a new note – assuming no note already has that WikiWord as a name.
You cannot create or edit notes which start with Docs:, Special: or New:. Note titles must also not contain any of the following characters ‘/’, ‘\’ or ‘;’.
Tap in the search bar and start typing. Trunk Notes will find notes with a matching name. If you want to search each note’s text tap on the “Search for” option. When searching a notes text large back and forwards icons will be displayed on the screen allowing you to skip through the note for each match.
You can display the names of all your notes by tapping the Wiki Entries button on the toolbar at the bottom of your screen. The buttons at the bottom of the screen will allow you to show notes organised alphabetically, by most recently edited and by popularity.
A history is kept of the notes you visit. Use the back and forwards buttons on the toolbar to navigate the history. Tapping the Home button will return you to your home page. You can change the name of your home page using the Settings app.
Tap edit to modify a note.
The toolbar at the bottom of the screen allows you to create headings, bulleted and numbered lists. Tap a button to set the formatting for the current line.
The other buttons on the edit toolbar are,
To change the format of the timestamp use the Settings app.
Trunk Notes can store images taken with your camera or from your photo library.
To create a new image entry,
If you want to insert an image directly into the note you are editing,
Trunk Notes will create a new wiki entry with your picture. You can edit the entry to associate text and add tags. You can include images in other notes. For example – {{image File:cat.png}} will include the image with the name File:cat.png. You can leave out the File: if you wish.
Images can be searched for in exactly the same way as text notes. Please note that in the current version of Trunk Notes images are not included in your backups.
You can create Sound Recordings in Trunk Notes.
As with images you can easily add text to your new Sound Recording note or tag the entry.
You can insert a Sound Recording directly into another note in a similar way to images.
Sound Recordings are not currently included in Trunk Notes backups.
To rename a page click Edit. Tap in the bar at the top containing the page name. Change the name of the page. Now click Save.
There are three buttons in edit mode to help you format your notes,
If you want to make some text bold, italic or strikethrough select it, then choose More… from the pop up menu. Tapping Bold, Italic or Strike will add that formatting to the selected text.
Trunk Notes uses a formatting system called Markdown. See the Docs:MarkdownSyntax for more information. You can also use most HTML tags in your notes – however Markdown is much simpler.
Organise your information the best way for you. Link notes together using WikiWord’s. A WikiWord is two or more words written as one word with each word starting with a capital.
When you see a WikiWord tap on it to go to the page, or create a page with that name.
Web links are opened by Safari.
Trunk Notes allows you to add tags to notes. Tags can be used to help organize lots of notes. For example you might tag the notes SpagBol and WinterSoup with the tag Recipe. The notes Groceries, BooksToRead and DvdsToBuy could be tagged with Shopping.
To get a list of all the notes with a particular tag simply tap in the search bar and select the tag or start typing to filter the list of tags.
You can add as many tags to a note as you like. To tag a note start editing the note then tap the Tag button on the toolbar. You can then assign an existing tag or create a new tag.
Tags are included in backups of your wiki entries.
If Trunk Notes has been able to get a fix on your position then newly created notes will have your current location added to the metadata.
To see where a note was created tap on the icon in the notes status bar (where the last updated time is displayed at the top of the note.) If you don’t see an icon then the note does not have a geotag.
You can update a notes geotag by selecting ‘Update Geotag’ from the action toolbar button when in edit mode.
If you wish to copy a note, tap on the button at the bottom right hand corner of the screen. Choose New… then Copy Of This Note. You will need to give the new note a name.
You may decide to create some notes to use as templates. Duplicate the template and fill it in.
You can view, edit and search for notes on your computer using a web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Safari). Just make sure your iOS device is connected to your local Wi-Fi network.
When viewing a note tap on the toolbar button situated at the bottom right of your screen and choose Wifi Sharing. You will be told the address to enter into your web browser’s address bar. For example, http://192.168.1.50:10000.
If you have turned on authentication you will be prompted for a username and password. These can be changed in the Settings application.
You can now view and edit notes using your web browser. Remember that your iOS device will fall asleep after a few minutes (if not attached to your computer) so if you find you lose the connection to Trunk Notes, just wake up your device.
You can mail a copy of a note. First tap on the button at the bottom right hand corner of the screen. Choose Mail…. You will now be given the change to mail a copy of the note fully formatted, mail a copy of the note in Markdown or mail a zipped backup of your entire wiki.
Please note that it may take Trunk a while to prepare the zipped backup. This depends on the size of your wiki.
Wikipedia defines a snippet as a “small region of re-usable … text”. Basically a snippet is a small piece of text which you want to insert into other notes. It might be your sign off used when writing a letter, for example “Best wishes, Matthew”. Instead of typing the text in every time you want it to appear you type in a shortcut.
Unless you have changed the default snippet settings all snippets in Trunk Notes have names starting with Snippet:. The snippets are just normal wiki entries. If you want to use a snippet you just type the snippets name (without the Snippet: prefix) followed by a series of characters which execute the snippet.
Here is an example,
Dear **,
Best wishes,
Matthew.
As you can see snippets can be very useful and you can create as many as you need. If you create useful collections of snippets ZIP them using Trunk Notess backup feature and post them on the Apps On The Move forum.
You may wish to use snippets to insert timestamps or otherwise evaluate a Trunk Notes function. Simply add !! to the start of the snippet text and Trunk Notes will evaluate any functions in the snippet before substituting the text. For example,
!!03/09/2011
will create a snippet which when executed will insert a timestamp as text, rather than inserting {{timestamp}}.
Functions are great for the more advanced Trunk Notes user. A function is a small piece of text which gets expanded by Trunk Notes everytime you view the note. For example, {{tagged Recipes}} will be expanded to show you a list of all the notes which have the recipe tag.
See Docs:Functions for details on the functions which Trunk Notes supports.
Note that the arguments to the functions (e.g. the name of a tag) are case sensitive. So {{tagged urgent}} and {{tagged Urgent}} refer to different tags.
If you wish to have all your pages displayed with a particular header or footer you can set this up by editing the pages Special:Header and Special:Footer. Any text in these will be included in all pages when they are displayed. Useful text might include a list of your top five pages for quick reference, or a list of backlinks to pages which link to the displayed page (i.e., add {{backlinks}} to Special:Footer)
To modify the Trunk Notes settings you need to use the Settings app on your iOS device. Exit Trunk Notes and return to the list of apps. Open the app Settings and scroll down until you find Trunk Notes. Tap Trunk Notes to see the settings.
There are a number of Trunk Notes settings,
Trunk Notes allows you to create a backup of all your wiki entries. This is achieved by clicking the Backup button in the Wi-Fi Sharing web interface. The default filename for the backup will include today’s date so you can easily manage multiple backups.
A Trunk Notes backup is a ZIP file of all your notes. The notes can be edited using a standard text editor. The first few lines of each file contain some information about the entry,
Using the Upload button in the web interface you can,
If you upload a ZIP of text files make sure that the files use UTF8 encoding. If Trunk Notes cannot interpret a file using UTF8 then the file will be ignored.
Although there is no inherent limit on the size of files which can be uploaded, or the size of the text files, remember that your iOS device is not a desktop computer.
Trunk Notes has the ability to sync your wiki to Dropbox. For this to work you must have created a Dropbox account.
Each page in your wiki will be represented by a single text file. Images and sound recordings will be uploaded also.
You can use this feature to keep your wiki in sync between multiple iOS devices. If you sync a new device to an existing wiki on Dropbox then notes from Dropbox will overwrite any notes with the same name on the device.
You can choose where the wiki is stored on Dropbox by changing the path in the Settings app. Inside the folder you choose there will be created the folders notes and files. Each wiki entry will have a text file in the notes folder. Any images or sounds will be uploaded to the files folder.
Trunk Notes uses the timestamps of files to help it work out what to sync. If the last modified timestamp of a file on Dropbox changes and is more recent that when it was last synced Trunk Notes will assume it has been updated.
As well as editing notes in Trunk Notes on your device you can edit the text files on Dropbox directly using another app or on your computer. Any changes you make will be synced back to your device. Trunk Notes adds a .markdown extension to synced files, however it will recognise files with .mkd, .md and .txt extensions.
To sync your wiki to Dropbox tap the action button when viewing a note and select Dropbox Sync… The first time you do this on a device you will need to log in to Dropbox. If you don’t wish to keep your Dropbox credentials on the device you can choose to log out after syncing your wiki.
Trunk Notes will identify when a note has been updated on your mobile device AND on Dropbox. If it detects this conflict then you must choose which version you wish to keep. You can at this point choose to cancel the sync operation.
If you have a large wiki and are syncing for the first time it may take a long time to initially sync your wiki to Dropbox. Large images and sound recordings can take a while to upload.
A full log of what Trunk Notes is doing is displayed whilst syncing so you can be sure what has been uploaded and downloaded from Dropbox.
NOTE: It is very important that the time on your device is set correctly if using the Dropbox sync feature. If the time is incorrect the sync algorithm may make the wrong choices when deciding what is new or updated.
In addition to text, images and sounds you can store other types of document in Trunk Notes. At the moment there is support for PDF documents. To add a PDF document to Trunk Notes connect your iOS device to your computer and use the iTunes File Sharing interface to add files.
Trunk Notes will create a note for each document added. For example if you added MeetingSchedule2011.pdf then a page File:MeetingSchedule2011.pdf will have been added.
When viewing a PDF you will be first shown a thumbnail of the first page. To view the individual pages in the PDF tap the thumbnail.
Trunk Notes supports AES-256 encryption. You can encrypt notes you wish to keep private. In order to view these notes a password must be entered.
To encrypt a note,
When using encryption for the first time you will be asked to choose a password. The longer the password the more secure your notes will be. This password is independent of your iOS unlock password, and the Trunk Notes Wi-Fi Share password.
If you decide a note doesn’t need to be encrypted simply edit the note, tap the action button and choose Decrypt.
To change the password used for encryption go to the page Special:Encrypt. This also allows you to lock encrypted notes without restarting Trunk Notes. Special:Encrypt will not exist until you use encryption for the first time. You can also access Special:Encrypt by tapping the padlock, in the wiki entry status bar, on any unlocked encrypted page.
If you wish to view encrypted notes in Wi-Fi Share mode you must have entered the password on your mobile device first. Remember that all data sent from Trunk Notes to your web browser is in plaintext.
When you take a backup of encrypted notes the note will be backed up in it’s encrypted state. If you wish to restore encrypted notes to a device you must ensure that the note Special:Encrypt is also restored. If Trunk Notes cannot decrypt this note then it will not decrypt any other notes. Trunk Notes can only contains notes encrypted with the same passphrase.
When your mobile device goes to sleep the password will be forgotten. If you were editing a note the note’s text will remain editable when the device is resumed.
If you exit Trunk Notes whilst editing an encrypted note it will be saved automatically for you. If the note’s name on exit was not valid a name will be automatically assigned to the note.
If you forget the password you chose to encrypt notes you will not be able to retrieve the notes.
Only a notes content is encrypted. The metadata is not (i.e. GPS location, name, last updated, tags) nor are images or sounds. You cannot perform fulltext searches on an encrypted note. Some Trunk Notes functions do not work with encrypted notes – for example {{action}}.
If you wish to change the fonts, background colors, etc of your wiki entries you can define your own custom stylesheet. A custom stylesheet is written using CSS.
To start turn on ‘Custom stylesheet’ in the Settings application.
Navigate to the page called Special:SetStyleSheet. Editing this page will update the stylesheet used to display your wiki pages on your iOS device.
If you would like the font size of the body text to be larger change the font-size attribute.
body {
font: medium “Arial”;
font-size: large;
background-color: #FFFFFF;
margin: 0;
}
The app icon for Trunk Notes can optionally display a badge. A badge displays a number allowing you to tell something about Trunk Notes from the app chooser.
When Trunk Notes exits it counts all of the bullet points in the note Special:Badge and displays that number as the badge.
By default the note Special:Badge will list all of the notes tagged with ToDo. This means that Trunk Notes will tell you how many ToDo items you have left.
Change Special:Badge to customise how Trunk Notes calculates the number for the badge.
Trunk Notes defines a number of default pages. The following documentation pages are available:
There are also some special pages, some of which can be edited to customise Trunk Notes:
You can go directly to any note from another app using the wiki:// or tn:// protocol.
For example if you write wiki://MyProject or tn://MyProject in OmniFocus then Trunk Notes will be opened and show you the MyProject note.
You are advised to use the tn:/// protocol as many of the Wikipedia apps register the wiki:/// protocol. The wiki:/// protocol is still supported for backwards compatibility with earlier versions of Trunk Notes.
See Special:WhatsNew to see what new features and bugs have been fixed in all versions of Trunk Notes.
If you need help with Trunk Notes or want to suggest improvements visit the forum or send an email.
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