Intentionally minimalist and accessible via the menu bar or a keyboard shortcut, Tot is a place to quickly jot down ideas, lists and notes – and have them be instantly available across all your devices. Instead of replacing other notes apps, in other words, Tot aims to complement them.

What we love: Tot’s simplicity. You’re limited to seven – and only seven – notes, each accessed via a circular button in the app’s toolbar: grey circles are empty, while coloured circles indicate notes where you’ve added text. Formatting is also simplified – just bold, italics, lists and links – so you can focus on substance rather than style. Prefer Markdown? Paste rich text into a Markdown note and Tot converts it on the fly, and vice versa.

Quick tip: Adding a checklist? Smart Bullets, added via the asterisk button, are special characters you can click to mark as done – for example, an open circle that changes to a filled circle. Pro tip: since Smart Bullets are plain-text characters, you can copy and paste them into any text app and they’ll retain their status, and you can create shortcuts for them in System Preferences > Keyboard > Text. (Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, almost every Tot action has a convenient one.)

Meet the creator: The Iconfactory has been making critically acclaimed apps, icons and interfaces for over 25 years. Tot started as an internal company tool to tame the mess of random text windows – ideas, comments, links, notes, to-do lists – on team members’ screens. The favourite feature of co-founder Craig Hockenberry is instant syncing across devices: “Have a great idea while walking your dog? Jot it down in Tot on your phone and it’s there when you get back to your Mac!”