The Killer App – Tot Pocket Review

There’s a photo techies love of the table full of technologies — cameras, fax machines, Game Boys, printed books, on and on — that were rendered obsolete by a single computer you can fit in your pocket. I can’t find that photo right now, and I don’t remember if a pad of sticky notes is on that table, but maybe that’s because people don’t think they’re obsolete. I still see sticky notes stuck to the bezels of people’s computer monitors all the time. That’s insane, though. Apps should be way better at that job, but thus far, none have been — not even Apple’s Stickies app on the Mac. But Tot by The Iconfactory has done that and much more. Tot is a notes app with an intentional, almost physical constraint: It contains exactly seven notes. They can all be infinitely long, of course, but there are seven of them, in fixed positions, each with its own fixed color. They instantly sync to all your devices. The primary mode for viewing notes is in rich text, supporting a pleasing array of fonts. (I’ve customized mine to use Apple’s New York Small, which takes some finagling on iOS but is quite possible.) Tot also allows you to dip into plain text, which translates your rich text formatting into a basic subset of Markdown, also allowing you to add links to text. In other words, while it’s ostensibly an app for dashed-off notes — “your mess,” as Tot’s help docs call it — it also makes for a quite pleasing writing environment. To wit, this text your reading began life in response to Tot developer Ged Maheux’s request that I write a review of Tot on the App Store. I realized that I would want to publish the review twice, on the Mac and on iOS, so I figured I’d write it in one place where I could easily retrieve it twice — where else but Tot? So I just opened Tot to the first note and began writing, and what effortlessly emerged was something I quickly realized I should publish on my blog. Now I’m watching the status bar at the bottom, pleasingly matched to the note’s background and highlight colors, as the word count ticks upward towards 500. That’s how natural a writing tool Tot is. If someone — let’s say my kid’s pediatrician — were to call me on the phone while I’m writing this, I may need to rapidly switch contexts and write something down. I’m used to fumbling a little bit in that situation. In Tot, the solution is absolutely natural: just jump one note over and write it down there. Tot’s design makes it seem perfectly natural to have completely disparate kinds of things in each note, and seven seems like a magic number for the most things you’d ever want to keep track of in a given day. The constraint of having exactly seven notes does something I don’t think Apple Notes will ever do, and that’s why I will continue to use both apps: Tot liberates you from ever having to remember where you put some piece of information. That’s where physical sticky notes fall down, especially if you need more than a couple. Apple Notes tries to help out with folders and search, but that still takes way too much cognitive overhead when you really need to find something. With Tot, you absolutely know where it is. Often the things you put into Tot don’t need to go anywhere when you’re done with them, but sometimes they will. In my life, Apple’s Notes is going to be the obvious destination. I treat Notes as long-term storage, so I’m going to have some folder in there where I put information from Tot that I need to keep around. I do keep random bits of info in the top-level Notes folder sometimes, so I guess that’s been my Tot until Tot came along. That demands a question, though: Why not just use Notes? Tot’s designers made some decisions that make it better for the kind of usage I’ve described above than Notes is. As far as writing notes goes, it’s a close call, but Tot built in just the right features in just the right places, whereas Notes took a more kitchen-sink approach that makes it less appealing to me, particularly in the toolbar on iPhone. Sure, sometimes I might want to add a photo in the middle of writing a note, but I’ll almost never want to doodle a picture with my meaty index finger, and Notes treats those as primary note-writing actions. Tot only has controls I will always want to use. The word and character count is also a big plus for me, as is the ability to quickly convert between rich text and Markdown. You can do that in Notes via Shortcuts, but that’s janky. On the Mac, where you can tweak the system to respond to custom keyboard shortcuts in whatever app you want, you can also get Notes to be comparable to Tot, but Tot’s already set up to appear and disappear on the Mac at your command, so there’s no need to fiddle. There’s also the undeniable loveliness of Tot, which Notes does not have. But the real reason to use Tot is the seven-note constraint. Even using the top-level folder in Notes the way I do, it’s still very hard to keep sane in there. I don’t know why it is — I’m not enough of a designer to explain it — but my hunch is that Tot’s seven dots provide two cognitive advantages. One is the color-coding, which must ingrain itself at some subconscious level while writing, because I really do find that it helps me remember what’s where, even though I’m just choosing the next open dot, not choosing a note based on color. The other is that you can always see how full you are, and once I get above three, I already start to feel like things are getting too complicated, and I need to do something. Every folder in Notes is an infinitely deep junk drawer, and yet somehow even having just two notes in there feels like too much. Consequently, these two apps fall very naturally into two different roles: Tot is for managing what’s top of mind, and Notes is for freezing information in carbonite for later retrieval.
Review by portalkeeper on Tot Pocket.