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: Gray circles are empty, while colored 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 or by pressing Control-8, 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 favorite feature of cofounder 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!”