We take things like capacitive touch screens for granted, but they’re a fairly recent innovation. The majority of writing in the twentieth century was produced on a QWERTY keyboard–a large chunk of that was performed on a manual typewriter. If you like the old-time tactile quality of a classic manual typewriter, but have come to appreciate the ease of use of an iPad, you’ll dig Austin Yang’s iTypewriter mechanical typewriter keyboard. Each key is mapped to match up with the built-in iOS keyboard, so as you type, a mechanical arm tipped with a conductive pad swings out and taps the capacitive screen to render a character. [via swissmiss]