When you think “App Developer”, you don’t think of “Oscar-winning actor”.
But typewriter enthusiast Tom Hanks isn’t your typical Hollywood star.
Tom Hanks is an old-fashioned kind of guy.
He once replied to a typewritten podcast invitation and typewriter gift from The Nerdist with a typewritten letter of his own.
In a New York Times interview, he spoke of his love for the more traditional ways of doing things:
I use a manual typewriter — and the United States Postal Service — almost every day. My snail-mail letters and thank-you notes, office memos and to-do lists, and rough — and I mean very rough — drafts of story pages are messy things, but the creating of them satisfies me like few other daily tasks.
And now, Hanks has combined his love of the old with the newest technology.
Working with developers, Hanx created the Hanx Writer app–a virtual typewriter for the iPad that mimics the look, sound, and text of a real typewriter.
Hanks even lent some of the typewriters from his personal collection to the app developers to create the app.
The free app immediately hit #1 on the App Store sales charts. There are also two pay versions that implement the different look and sounds of two other typewriters in Hanks’s collection.
No word yet if it’s available for MacBook or iPhone. But Hanks is also a MacBook Air user, so there’s a possibility.
It’s an unusual idea, but one that Hanks believes brings back the feel of good, old-fashioned writing:
‘With Hanx Writer, you’ll hear the rhythm of your work with SHOOK SHOOK or FITT-FITT.” – Tom Hanks said.
‘No longer must you surrender modern luxuries, like the DELETE key, to enjoy the look, feel, and sound of good, old-fashioned word-processing.’
