Updated 06142024-152935
I’d lusted after Iconfactory’s Tot for its app icons for a long time, but it wasn’t until a sale at the beginning of the year that I actually dove in and bought Tot Pocket - the iOS app. As a primarily iPhone-bound user, now, I’ve found it extremely handy as a container for URL-scheme-powered links, largely to run Siri Shortcuts and open specific drafts in Drafts.
Tot’s had its own URL scheme all along, which I utilized in two published Drafts actions: “Append to 7th Tot Dot” (which works cross-platform) and “Fetch Contents of # Tot Dot” (which uses Applescript and is therefore macOS-only.) Here’s an example of the scheme, itself:
tot://7/append?text=%0A[Text]
For better or worse, though, there is now a much more reliable solution. Iconfactory added Siri Shortcuts actions for Tot on all supported platforms, and I’ve already switched to using them, instead. I find the overview in their blog post (and release notes) to be a bit vague, so I think it’s worth listing each of the new actions:
These comprehensively replace the functions of both Tot’s URL scheme and the available macOS script, adding significant functionality on top. For one thing, Add to Dot is smart enough to automatically add a space before appending any content to the end of a Dot, unlike the URL scheme’s append function.
The first and most basic Siri Shortcuts I have to offer are Clear Dot - which erases all contents from a Dot specified at run after one has confirmed with a Show Alert action - and Tot ⇨ Apple Notes which simply transfers the current contents of all 7 Tot Dots to individual Apple Notes per each. If you’d like to transfer content in the other direction, using Send a Copy in the pre-sharesheet from Apple Notes and then selecting Tot’s icon seems to do so fairly reliably:
Next is Tot Jar, which uses the Query Dot action to store the full JSON data of all 7 dots in individual key paths within a single dictionary in Data Jar.
Hot Tot Dot Swap - undoubtedly my best-titled Shortcut, yet - allows one to reliably swap the contents of two Tot Dots. Dot Info prompts you to select a Dot and then displays all available information about it that is not content. It will then ask if you’d like to append said info to the Dot, itself, in this format:
Dots Summary sums up the line, word, and character counts for all 7 Tot Dots, combined. It, too, will offer to append the result to a Dot of your choosing.
One of Tot’s existing less-than-obvious capabilities, titled links can be appended from the share sheet in Safari as shown in the screenshot embedded above, but my Markdown Link ⇨ Dot shortcut goes a step further, formatting the titled link as a markdown list item (-). The video demo embedded below makes this process feel a lot more sluggish than it practically is, especially if you prioritize the shortcut in your own sharesheet list.
Reminders List ⇨ Tot is, by default, an extremely verbose method of itemizing the whole of a given list in Apple Reminders in a Tot Dot, complete with URL scheme-enabled links, tags, dates, notes, and URLs. Here’s the format in full, spacing included:
**[Title](URL)**
`Tags`
[Link](URL)
Created: Creation Date
Due: Due Date
Notes
Hopefully it isn’t obvious, but this is perhaps the only shortcut shared in this Post for which I don’t personally have a use, but I can imagine an especially lengthy list transforming into a somewhat more visually-digestible view via a modified version with all but the markdown-formatted title link omitted. Here’s an example result out of the box:
