

Tom Hanks’ Typewriter App Is No. 1 in the App Store - mind_heist
http://time.com/3139360/tom-hanks-typewriter-app-is-no-1-in-the-app-store/

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olefoo
The power of celebrity endorsement at work. This isn't to say that had this
app been built without any connection to Tom Hanks it wouldn't have found an
audience, but this way it starts with a much bigger audience than it would
have had on it's own. Now, nobody needs a typewriter styled text editor on
their iPad, but we can all imagine Forrest Gump tapping out the first draft of
his story on a manual Remington typewriter. And that inspires the desire for
an app like this.

It's the power of the story you tell about your product, and celebrities tend
to be expert storytellers.

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viggity
A buddy of mine was in a non-yc accelerator. One of the questions/goals they
had for him was to find his ideal celebrity investor. It's so simple and
effective at generating PR (and a little investment cash), I was disappointed
I never had thought about it that way before. Not necessarily easy to do if
you don't have the right momentum, but effective if you can pull it off.

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mind_heist
Interesting ! But celebrity investment doesn't guarantee anything apart from a
lot of initial press and traction,do they ? Those startups continue are
vulnerable to the same failures like any other. Ashton Kutcher invested in the
social flirting app which failed to take off , Leonardo Di Caprio invested in
Mobli (which isn't big right now either) and a few others. If there is no
alignment of the celebrity's existing brand & image to the startup they invest
in , the value seems to be strictly initial publicity.

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buyx
Back in the early 1990s I was forced to do typing as a subject in the South
African equivalent of junior-high school. We used mechanical (Olivetti?)
typewriters (electric typewriters were for the older students who did typing
as an elective). Even at the time, we found the whole thing archaic, as many
of us had computers and printers, but obviously the school curriculum didn't
move forward at the speed of technology. And mechanical keyboards aren't
romantic when the typewriters and keys jam up and/or break in weird ways.
Carriage returns weren't automatic either, as they are on the Hanxwriter
app...you needed to manually move the lever on the left.

After a rocky start (because I refused to cheat and look at the keys), and two
years of typing exercises, I found it was a useful skill, and, even now the
keyboard "gets out of the way" when I type on any device.

I wonder if there are long-term benefits to formal typing education, vs
picking things up, along the way, and if it is still taught formally at
school.

As for the app, my first impression is that it provides an _ersatz_ sanitised
version of a real mechanical typewriter. Maybe that's a good thing, but it
doesn't seem to fulfill any need that I have.

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CmonDev
"...but it doesn't seem to fulfill any need that I have."

It's a novelty app. Just like one of those "crack the screen" apps. You
install it once to show to friends and that's it.

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senthil_rajasek
I was expecting a video with Tom Hanks typing "Dear ShopGirl..." :-(

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kaiyuanl
He writes code by himself?

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robert_tweed
It was built by agency Hitcents, who gave the production process a fairly
detailed write-up here:

[http://www.hitcents.com/b2b/work/hanx](http://www.hitcents.com/b2b/work/hanx)

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ja27
It's moderately interesting because it was built using Xamarin. So the top
iPad app (at least for a little while) was built using C#.

[http://blog.xamarin.com/tom-hanks-vintage-typewriter-
inspire...](http://blog.xamarin.com/tom-hanks-vintage-typewriter-inspired-
hanx-writer-app/)

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supercoder
He's almost as accomplished as Kim Kardashian now then.

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jzymbaluk
I guess this is the result of Apple finally allowing custom keyboards[1]. I've
heard people say that you can make more money developing an app for iOS
instead of Android and the fact that a simple app like this typewriter
emulator - which would have been possible for years on Android - could sell so
much reenforces that notion in my mind.

I suppose the success could just be due to the fact that it's being endorsed
by a celebrity like Tom Hanks?

[1][https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/Keyboard.html)

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mitchty
Custom keyboards only work in ios 8, which isn't released yet. This is just a
regular app. Comparing it to android seems... unnecessary.

