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.

Well , Tom Hanks being associated with the App definitely drove a lot of traffic to it. But would you consider this as an endorsement ? Like Britney spears endorsing Pepsi ,where you arent involved in any of the development process and simply show up in an Ad ?

Looks like this is an App that Tom Hanks wanted to make himself out of his love for old and archaic Typewriters* , did not have CS Skills for it , hired an agency and got it done! ( some other articles do mention that he owned a personal collection of vintage typewriters)

Definitely more than an endorsement , but yeah the app has a celebrity appeal to it ( like how Super Copters would now get a lot of press , just because its from Flappy Bird's Dev ) . A fair amount of effort is involved in building one's brand before things you do gain automatic traction.

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.

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.

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.

"...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.

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

He writes code by himself?

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

http://www.hitcents.com/b2b/work/hanx

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...

Sure, in the same sense that Paul Newman mixes salad dressing.

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

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...

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