Tot

2023-08-06

An elegant, simple way to collect & edit text on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

It’s been a while since I have been delighted by an app. Craig Hockenberry and the icon factory did a great job creating Tot, you can tell they payed attention to the small details.

Tot is a digital scratchpad. A simple iOS and macOS app that gives you seven locations to save text. Each location is represented by a dot. Each dot represents a separate virtual file, there is no option to open or create files. At first this simplicity feels limiting but after using the app for a while you realize simplicity is Tot’s killer feature. You don’t have to think about opening or closing files. There is little friction in capturing text, notes thoughts…

Each dot has unique colors that are beautiful. Having different colors for each dot gives you a quick reference for each dot. Tot supports light and dark mode. Both look great. When swiping between dots on iOS you get haptic feedback. Tot uses iCloud sync witch has been rock solid. Having a Mac and iPhone app is great, I can capture and access text no matter where I am. Tot has the option to switch between plain text and rich text. On both macOS and iOS Tot shows you the number of lines, word count and total characters.

Markdown support is limited, bold, italics and auto bullets are the only supported features. It would be nice if Tot had better Markdown support, if Tot supported the basics of markdown. In the end this is not a big deal and probably out of scope. Tot is meant to be a simple scratch pad not a complete markdown editor. I understand the desire to keep the app simple.

The keyboard on iOS has an extra row that has 6 keys, bold, italics, tab and 3 extra charters keys on the right. It would be nice if there where more options to customize the keyboard. If I could replace some of the keys with “-”, “#” and if I could have arrow keys that move the cursor, similar to 1Writer.

Tot has an interesting pricing model. The macOS app is free, the iOS app is $20.00. I was reluctant to pay $20.00 dollars for a minimal iPhone app. It’s not that I have a problem paying $20.00 for quality software. I didn’t know if the app would meat my needs, I didn’t want to pay $20.00 for a crappy app. After a week I decided to take a chance on Tot because Tot was mentioned by Merlin Mann on Mac Power Users #528, Reviewed By Federico Viticci at MacStories and John Gruber at Daring Fireball. I also recognized and trusted The iconfactory as the developer.

My concern with the $20.00 price is that it might limit the audience of Tot. That people will pass on a quality iOS app because it cost $20.00. Resulting in reduced development time, less support for Tot. In the end this probably wont be a big deal because Tot will remain a small niche app that needs minimal development time.

From the macOS command line I couldn’t find any text files related to Tot. The goal was to run unix commands and bash scripts on the text in Tot. This was looking like a deal breaker. The issue was I couldn’t backup the data in plain text files. Thanks to John Gruber’s review I found a shell script that can read, append and clear the text in each dot. This is perfect, just what I needed.

Tot isn’t properly scriptable with AppleScript, but it does have a URL scheme (documented in Tot’s excellent Help — just that fact that Tot has excellent Help is commendable nowadays) that you can call from AppleScript or shell scripts. Hockenberry wrote a small shell script that works as a command-line companion tool — you can use it to append to or get the contents of any dot by number. I’ve already forked it with a version that adds support for dot “0” (zero) to target the first empty dot, if there is one. -John Gruber

Tot checks the right boxes quick capture, plain text, simple, beautiful design and reliable sync. Thank you for making this app. I am happy I spent $20.00 on Tot.