Did you know?: Tom Hanks’ typewriter app tops iTunes store chart

Actor Tom Hanks launched a typewriter app for iPad last week that has shot to the top of the iTunes App Store, ranking number one in both the ‘Productivity’ and ‘Overall’ sections, reported Techcrunch.

Titled ‘Hanx Writer’, the app turns your iPad into an old-fashioned typewriter, offering a pseudo analog-typing experience. With hard returns and key presses and chimes that ring when you reach the end of a new line, the app has people hyped up. It also boasts the ability to correct without white tape or whiteout and options to print, email and share your documents.

The app comes in three versions for the iPad with the basic model available for free download. Hanks has spent a lifetime reading typed-out scripts and corresponding via typewriters from his personal collection. He said he was inspired by the colourful, charming experience of typing on a real typewriter, complete with satisfying clicks and that unmistakable “ding” as the machine moves to the next line, reported the Guardian.

“In the late 1970s, I bought a typewriter, portable enough for world travel and sturdy enough to survive decades of ten-fingered beatings. Since then, I’ve acquired many more, each different in design, action, and sound. Everyone stamps into paper a permanent trail of imagination through keys, hammers, cloth and dye — a softer version of chiselling words into stone,” wrote Hanks as part of the app’s introduction.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 22^nd, 2014.

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