But what do you do when you come across something you want to ? Maybe you find a cool new Mac app you want to try out, or perhaps someone sends you a link to an archive of photos. With a few exceptions, iOS devices don't let you download files. And even if you've got a laptop, sometimes you don't want to download a lot of data onto its small drive, or you want to download big files using your desktop Mac's speedy network connection.

In the past, I've handled these situations by emailing myself the URL to a download or webpage. When I got back to my iMac, I then used the link in that email message to download the data. But recently I've been using a clever utility called () to download files to my desktop Mac no matter where I am when I come across the link.

NoteTote requires a free or paid account with , the online note-syncing service. The first time you launch NoteTote, you log in to your Simplenote account--that's the entire setup process. NoteTote automatically creates a new Simplenote note called NoteTote_Downloads, and it creates a new NoteTote folder located, by default, in your home folder's Downloads folder (~/Downloads).

Whenever NoteTote is running, it periodically checks the NoteTote_Downloads file for new URLs. (The default interval is 10 minutes, though you can change this.) Whenever NoteTote finds a new URL, as long as that URL points to a publicly accessible file, NoteTote downloads that file to its downloads folder and removes the URL from the NoteTote_Downloads note; depending on your settings, NoteTote can also add the URL to a log file called Note_Tote_Download_Log.