Have you ever spent long minutes painstakingly tapping or swyping out a message in an app on your Android phone only to lose it all when the app crashes, or you accidentally tap the wrong thing and go back to your home screen only to find your hard work gone when you get back? Or maybe you just accidentally selected all and typed something, and couldn’t find a way to undo it? It may not happen often, but it sure is as frustrating as anything when it does.
Gizmodo proposes a solution: install a keylogger on your phone. Well, they don’t actually call it a keylogger, and unlike keylogger malware it explicitly does not track the content of protected password fields. But the $1.99 “Type Machine” app essentially records all the text you type in Android apart from those fields so that you can easily go back and retrieve what you just typed, even after you’ve already hit the “submit” button and sent it on.
It’s easy to see how this app could be useful, and not just for retrieving text you lost by accident. For example, if you just typed a long message that you want to send to several different friends or chat channels, no longer do you have to remember to select it all and copy it before you send it the first time.
Given that Android doesn’t always make it easy to undo deletes, and app crashes do happen, this could be a useful application for people who do a lot of typing on their phones or tablets. While it could also mean anyone who gets their hands on your phone can retrieve things you had typed in the last day or so, they could probably retrieve a lot of other information from it even without this app—so the most important rule is, be sure you use a good password lock on your phone.
In the desktop computing world, we often snicker or roll our eyes at people who lost work because they spent a long editing session without periodically hitting the save button. But in the mobile world, I find that many apps don’t actually provide a means to save intermediate results without sending/updating/committing as if we were done.
Type Machine might just relieve that feeling of walking a tightrope without a net.