Tot
Tot is a lightweight companion app for managing, editing, and sharing text between applications, and is available for both Mac & iOS.
Tot is the ultimate digital scratchpad for your text-based workflow, a solid companion app that has your back for storing text snippets and links while you move between apps and do whatever it is you do.
Love
Color Motif: I love the motif of navigating through various text panels through colour identification. Spatially, colour feels far more natural to track than text (i.e., it's easier for me to remember that I put a snippet in the green panel than in the seventh panel), which makes for quick navigation through the app¹! Also, the use of colour help reinforce the purpose of Tot, that it's a lightweight 'fun' text editor (colours = fun), not where you will write the next great American novel.
Customization: I appreciate Tot's unique customization options. As a little Easter egg, in Tot on the Mac, you can customize the colour look of each text panel, and if you've purchased the iOS application, those custom colours are mirrored across your iOS devices. Also, an application will always get bonus points if it includes a palette of app icons on iOS (which Tot does!)
Limitations: Tot was not designed to be a long-term repository for text. By capping the number of digital panels to seven, Tot ensures that it's primary purpose remains to collect, edit, and share text between applications. It doesn't let me hoard information; that should be a selling feature in and of itself.
iCloud Sync: Tot quickly syncs snippets across all your devices, and this makes for a great workflow experience! I can casually grab a couple of text snippets, add a note, paste a URL in Tot, and have all that instantly available to me when I move to another device and am ready to work with that information.
Dislike
Symbol Shortcuts: I love that long-pressing on one of the three symbols inside the iOS app opens up a quick selection of glyphs to select. I wish that a small curated window of symbols could be accessed on the Mac instead of going through the Character Viewer.
Wish For
Share Sheet Integration: More share sheet integration so that I could send or prepend/append a snippet of text into Tot directly from any application.
Judging from Tot’s twitter account, this feature is currently in Beta & coming to a future release of the app.
Shortcuts Integration: I would love to see a future version of Tot add integration with Shortcuts.
Sherlocked: I would never want this app to go away, god forbid, but I wish that macOS/iOS had some Tot-esque system-wide clipboard functionality built into the operating system.
Tot is available as a free app on the Mac App Store & and as a one-time purchase of $19.99 on the iOS App Store to access across all your iOS devices. The care that went this app along with the value it affords me daily make Tot a solid purchase for my use case. I highly recommend it.
External Links:
Tot Website: tot.rocks
¹The makers of Tot wrote a fascinating article about tweaking the accessibility of Tot after one of their users gave feedback about how his colour deficiency impacted his use of the app.
