Tom Hanks is well known as a player of piano keys. Less well known: he's also a fan of the keys of a typewriter.
Hanks' typewriter app for the iPad -- called Hanx Writer -- launched Thursday, and has since dominated the App Store, where it ranks no. 1 in free apps, and boasts a 4.5 star rating based on more than 1,300 reviews.
The app replicates all the noises typewriter lovers have come to associate with the device -- the clicking of keys, the chiming when you come to the end of a line -- and comes with a single font, color and typewriter available in the free, default version. You can unlock more font and typewriter features with in-app purchases.
Hanks has revealed he is an avid typewriter collector; he started collecting them in 1978 when a store owner in Cleveland refused to fix Hanks' mostly plastic typewriter, and instead sold him a Hermes 2000.
More recently, the actor decided to transition his love of mechanical writing to the Apple tablet. In a New York Times editorial in August 2013, Hanks wrote:
"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."
Though Hanks did admit that Hanx Writer might not be the best for "a term paper or legal brief" when asked how he hoped the app would be used in a Twitter Q&A with Apple's official @AppStore account, he did say he hoped it would be used for everything "that you want to have stick around a bit."
.@AppStore If you have writing to do, do it on a Hanxwriter. Maybe not a term paper or legal brief... #HanxWriter— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) August 14, 2014
.@AppStore but the notes and passages and journal entries that you want to have stick around for a bit... #HanxWriter— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) August 14, 2014
.@AppStore For the love letter that has to look, you know, special. For the nine paragraphs that leap out of your mind... #HanxWriter— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) August 14, 2014
Based on the position of Hanx Writer on the App Store, it seems there are a lot of love letters and journal entries that demand to be written on a typewriter simulator.