Laptop’s gotten too heavy? Do you get odd looks when you whip out your manual Royal Aristocrat typewriter at Starbucks?

Now you can take the cool restrictedness of Typewriter with you in your pocket. The Typewriter iPhone app is now listed on the iTunes store!

While iPhone 3.0 tried to thwart Typewriter’s goal of no copy/paste, it proved no match for an Elance programmer. No delete, no copy/paste. Just straightforward typing. Sort of (more in a second).

You can type in portrait or landscape mode. The files are saved as texts on your phone, or for an easier transfer the text can be copied into an email to send to yourself, Google Docs, or where ever you like.

Under options you have the same black text on white or green on black options, PLUS the option to turn full typewriter mode off. Typewriter mode would be the thing that you’re used to – no delete, copy/paste, insert. Turn it off and now you’ve got a basic text editor. You can also go back and edit what you typed with typewrite mode on.

I know I talked about free things on ProBlogger, but there was a bit more invested in this (I had to sign up as an Apple Developer on top of hiring a programmer), so it’s listed for $.99 (or whatever the equivalent is for your country’s store).

Visit the Typewrite App Store Page.

Please let me know what you think and leave some feedback here and at the App Store!

Writing on a manual [typewriter] makes you slower in a good way, I think. You don’t revise as much, you just think more, because you know you’re going to have to retype the entire fucking thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it.
- Will Self

Reading the title you can probably guess what this program can do, or more what it can’t do. The above quote got me thinking about the process of writing on a typewriter and I was surprised to not be able to find any program that could mimic that interaction.

So on a whim I ran with this weird idea and turned to Elance, where I found Denis Sokol in Russia and he created this program.

It’s super, super simple and basic. All you can do is type in one direction. You can’t delete, you can’t copy, you can’t paste. You can save and print. And you can switch between black text on white and green on black; full screen and window.

Download Here

The program runs through Java, so it should work on any operating system, but make sure you have the latest version of Java here. Feel free to share, modify, and post the program however you like. All I ask is that you please reference this site with a link either directly to this post or the site (http://www.lifehackingmovie.com).

Hope you enjoy and let me know what are you thoughts are on using it.

This software is licensed under the CC-GNU GPL version 2.0 or later.