App Review: Tomato Typewriter

They say there’s nothing like a deadline to increase productivity; a notion I, personally, have always found to be true. So, if you’re the sort of writer who enjoys writing on your Android tablet or smartphone but need the threat of a deadline to get you going, Tomato Typewriter by Zest Works might just be the app for you. This elegant little app encourages non-stop writing by punishing you whenever you stop writing, either by deleting your words (gradually or all at once) or playing an annoying sound.

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You begin each session by customising the session’s rules: specifically, whether or not you want a timed session, your session targets and what kind of threat you want for stopping. Then, as soon you hit that ‘start’ button, you just write like fury until your time elapses or you reach your target word count, depending on whether or not you opted for a timed session. If you pause while writing, a clock will appear on the screen to warn you that you’re about to be punished. If you don’t continue writing immediately, you will indeed be punished. When you successfully complete a session, you will be given the option to carry on writing with or without threat of punishment. Your work is then saved to the app for you to share, copy to clipboard or delete as you see fit (you won’t be able to edit a session once you have closed it, however).

So, let’s have a closer look.

The first thing I would say is that this app is very easy on the eye and highly intuitive to use (this alone makes it stand head and shoulders above more famous tools of this type, like Write or Die). Even a dafty like me can download it and immediately start using it to its fullest potential without wasting any time trying to figure out where everything is or how to use it. There are also no ugly adverts popping up all over the place.

Like most writing apps these days, it boasts a choice of ‘light’ or ‘dark’ themes and the font size and style are also adjustable to suit your preferences. You can also choose to enable or disable a visible word count, time remaining and threat warnings. All very useful, though I would point out that the visible time remaining/word count actually appears as a very thin gauge at the bottom of your screen, just above the keyboard. It doesn’t give you a specific count with numbers you can clearly understand. In fact, it’s so subtle that when I first tried it out, I thought the feature wasn’t working at all; but it is working. It’s just very discreet.

One more big selling point for this app is that it’s free. Truly, honestly, free. Not ‘free but with locked features you need to pay for’ or ‘free as long as you watch twenty minutes of adverts’. It’s completely and utterly free!

I have only one real criticism of this app(and it’s certainly not a major deal breaker): there is no obvious way to directly export your work into a standard text format which you can use on other apps. All you can do is ‘share’ your work on another app and save it from there. Apart from being a clumsy approach to exporting your work, I also found that many of the apps I use for creating text files weren’t actually compatible with the Tomato Typewriter. I got an error whenever I tried to share my work to JotterPad, Polaris, and even Google Docs. It did, however, work like a charm with Writer Plus.

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All in all, this is a beautiful little app. It does what it says on the tin with no fuss and just enough bells and whistles to make it do everything you might want it to. If you’re looking for a timed writing app which punishes you for not writing and doesn’t break the bank then look no further. This is the one.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

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I’m still looking to interview fiction authors here on Penstricken, especially new or indie authors. Whether it’s books, plays, comics or any other kind of fiction, if you’ve got something written, I want to hear about it. If you’re interested in having your work featured on Penstricken, be to sure to drop us an e-mail or message us on Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest.

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• Sharleen Nelson, Author of The Time Tourists [2]
• D. Wallace Peach, Author of the Shattered Sea duology [2]