I’m building MyTypewriter because my mother-in-law wants to write her memoirs, and I want to help her use an old laptop to do it. She is not particularly comfortable with computers. The job I want the computer to do is straightforward: give her somewhere to write.
That sounds like a small request. A keyboard, a screen, a document. Yet getting from turning on a computer to putting words on a page can involve a surprising amount of computer. There are applications to find, windows to navigate and choices to make before reaching the thing you sat down to do. Knowing how to manage all of that is a separate skill from having a story to tell.
MyTypewriter started with a very plain ambition: Power on. Start typing. I keep coming back to that idea because it describes the experience I’m trying to build more clearly than a feature list could. Turn on the machine and get to the writing. A memoir is already a substantial undertaking. Operating the equipment should take as little attention as possible.
A smaller job for the computer
The initial scope was simply to type, format, save and print. That is a useful boundary to work within. There is plenty to get right in those few words: making the writing comfortable, keeping documents understandable and making the next step clear.
It is also a useful question to ask whenever another idea appears. Does this help someone write, make a simple formatting choice or keep their work? Features have a habit of arriving with reasonable explanations for themselves. Eventually the writer needs a reasonable explanation for where the page went.
The direction is a dedicated offline writing environment, with local documents and simple formatting. I want the machine to have an obvious purpose when it starts. I want the writing to remain the centre of the experience, with the necessary controls easy to understand and the rest of the computer asking for as little attention as possible.
A short feature list does not automatically produce a simple experience. Small decisions about what appears on screen and what happens next still need care.
Giving an older laptop a useful purpose
The older laptop I set out to repurpose has a Celeron N3060 with 4GB of RAM. That gives this project a concrete setting: modest hardware and a specific writing task, rather than a reason to buy another computer.
An old laptop still has a keyboard and a screen. Giving it a focused job offers a way to keep useful hardware in use. Testing against that modest setup also gives me a practical constraint: the writing experience has to earn its place on the machine.
Starting close to home
Starting with one person gives the technical decisions a practical test: will this make the writing easier to begin and easier to return to? That helps keep the work focused when there are plenty of other directions it could take.
I can imagine other writers finding a focused environment like this useful, whether they want a quieter place to work or have an older laptop they would like to put to use. I intend to make MyTypewriter open source so that possibility can extend beyond the machine and person it started with.
There isn’t a public download available yet.