Trunk Notes - Settings

Trunk Notes has many features and can be customised in a number of ways. It will be worth your time exploring the various settings for Trunk Notes.

To change any of the settings for Trunk Notes you need to use the Settings app on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Some apps allow you to change the settings within the app itself but Trunk Notes requires the use of the Settings app. If you currently have Trunk Notes running press the home button to return to the list of apps, and find the Settings app.

Once you have loaded Settings scroll down until you see Trunk Notes.

Let us now look at each of the settings in turn and why they are useful.

General

Capitalize Wiki Words

In a wiki a WikiWord is two or more words written as one word, each word starting with a capital letter. When you create a note in Trunk it will automatically try and turn it into a valid wiki word. For example you might type “Books to read next year” and Trunk will create a note with the title BooksToReadNextYear. This is fine in English, French and many other languages. However for some languages this doesn’t make sense – for example Japanese. So users who want to use Trunk Notes with Japanese will want to turn this off.

Easy Line Break

Trunk Notes uses the Markdown syntax for formatting pages. In strict Markdown if you want text to appear on two separate lines you need to put two spaces at the end of the first line. This is fine when typing on your computer, but annoying to attempt in iOS. By default Easy Line Break is turned on so that the text in edit mode looks a lot more like the text as it is displayed when browsing your wiki. Easy Line Break also makes it much easier to copy/paste text from other apps and not have to spend time modifying it.

Home page on start

This is really only useful if you are using a device or iOS which doesn’t support multitasking. It will force Trunk to forget the page being displayed and always show your HomePage on start.

Home page

By default your home page, the one shown when you tap the home button, is called HomePage. If you want it to be called something else (such as HomePage in your native language) then rename it here. Anything you enter will be converted into a valid WikiWord.

Timestamp

It is really easy to insert the current date and/or time into a note. When editing you simply tap the action button and then choose Insert Timestamp.

There are a number of different timestamp formats to choose from. If for example you want a timestamp like 2010-12-31 12:02 then pick YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm.

Default Email

Providing a default email address can be helpful if you make use of the email backup facility on a regular basis. I have mine entered and can send a backup of my entire wiki with just four taps – action, Mail…, Mail Backup, Send.

Geotag Wiki Entries

If this is turned on then Trunk Notes will attempt to record the longitude and latitude of your current position whenever a new note is created. If you don’t care about such things then turn this off. Trunk Notes will of course ask you before getting your location the first time this feature is used. If you want to disallow Trunk from looking at your location then in Settings go to General > Location Services and set Trunk Notes to off.

Display

Custom stylesheet

Trunk Notes is a very customisable app. Using a custom stylesheet can allow you to completely change the style of your notes. You can change the font, colours, even add background images. If you want a custom stylesheet to be used for all of your notes turn this setting on and then in Trunk Notes edit the page Special:SetStyleSheet. Warning – you will need to know some basic CSS to use this feature successfully! w3schools.com has a good introduction to CSS.

Allow landscape

This setting is useful for users running iOS versions prior to 4.0. If you find it annoying when the display automatically rotates to landscape then turn this off (e.g. using Trunk Notes in bed when lying on your side).

Data Detectors

Data detectors are an iOS feature which automatically detects phone numbers, URLs, dates, addresses, etc. If you would prefer not to have links automatically appearing in your notes then turn this setting off.

Snippets

Snippets are a powerful feature in Trunk to help speed up text entry. For example you might have a snippet called Snippet:addr which inserts your address whenever you type addrxx (the xx being the ‘execute’ text to run the snippet).

Prefix

By default all snippets you define must have their name start with Snippet:. If you want to use something else, or (and this isn’t recommended) dispense entirely with the need for a prefix, change this setting. The lack of a prefix effectively turns all notes into potential snippets – which could get confusing…

Execute text

Unlike other snippet systems, such as TextExpander, Trunk Notes prefers you to type in the snippet name followed by the ‘execute text’. The idea is to make it easy to define snippets with easy to remember names – such as date – but not be annoyed by snippets being expanded when you type common words. The default execute text is xx. So if you have a snippet called Snippet:date then entering datexx will expand the snippet. You can turn off the execute text, just make sure this setting is empty.

Wi-Fi Sharing

Trunk Notes can be used with the cloud service Dropbox to allow text to be entered on your computer and then transferred onto your mobile device. However not everyone wants their information held in the cloud or on services which they don’t control. Wi-Fi Sharing provides you with another way to interact with Trunk Notes. In Wi-Fi Sharing mode Trunk runs a web server which you can access over wifi. The web server presents you with Trunk Notes in your web browser and you can create, search for and edit notes. This is a very convenient method for editing longer notes.

Authentication

Unless you will be always using Trunk Notes on a private wifi network it is recommended to keep this on. When turned on you will be prompted for a username and password when trying to access the Trunk Notes web server.

Username/Password

This is the username and password used for the Wi-Fi Sharing service.

Port

When you use your web browser to connect to Trunk Notes you will be instructed to enter the IP address and a port – for example http://192.168.1.102:10000. The 10000 is the port. Each ‘service’ which runs on a server has a port, and allows a server to offer multiple services (e.g. web, ftp, ntp, ssh, …). Usually a web server runs on port 80 – however non-Apple apps cannot use ports numbered below 1024 (known as privileged ports). If you need to use a port other than 10000 change it here.

Don’t Fall Asleep

Your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad will most likely be running on battery power. In order to maximise your battery your device will fall asleep if you don’t interact with it after a few minutes. If however you are accessing the Trunk Notes web server you would probably rather it stayed awake until you were finished. This setting only takes affect when Wi-Fi Sharing is turned on.

Backup/Upload/Sync

Strip file extensions

You can upload a zip file of text documents to Trunk Notes. This might be a zip file created by a Trunk Notes backup or a zip file you have created yourself. If you use a text editor it will probably have saved each file with an extension – for example MyNote.txt. You would not however want the note to have the name MyNote.txt in Trunk, but rather the name MyNote. If this is the case make sure Strip file extensions is turned on.

Note at the time of writing (2.4.1) this setting has no effect when used with Dropbox sync.

Windows friendly

This setting gets Trunk Notes to cope with the different line endings (i.e. the special characters carriage return and line feed) which Windows prefers. If you use Mac OS X or Linux keep this turned off. If you use however Notepad on Windows you will want to turn this on. I would recommend though you explore editors other than Notepad!

Dropbox Path

When using the Dropbox sync facility Trunk Notes will store all of the notes, images and sounds in the folder specified here. By default it is /trunksync. You may prefer however to use something else. Note: there is a bug in 2.4.1 which stops the sync working properly if you specify a nested folder – e.g. /folder1/folder2/folder3. This will be fixed in 2.4.2.