Trunk Notes for Mac - an update

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.