There’s a real vacuum when it comes to document editing software in the App Catalog (we’re looking at you, Dataviz). Sure, Google Docs allows you to do some basic editing to spreadsheet documents via the Web using Google Docs, and there are some rudimentary text editing programs available to webOS users, but until Scratch ($5.00 in the App Catalog) came along, there hasn’t been a way to edit text documents with rich markup while also smartly utilizing the cloud.
Scratch is a word editing program that offers full document editing with a wide array of text formatting options. In addition to supporting true paragraphs, Scratch allows you to bold, italicize and underline text as you’d expect, and you can format blocks of text with bulleted lists, numbered lists, and heading sizes. Enhancing this feature set, nearly every formatting option has a keyboard shortcut associated with it (gesture area + L will, for example, create a bullet list from selected text), allowing for surprisingly efficient document editing. There’s no question that the $5 asking price is a tad steep for those features alone, and the program sweetens the pot by adding the ability to import and export text documents directly from Google Docs.
This program is solid enough in its own right, but what would make this blogger especially giddy? If the folks behind Scratch and the folks behind the Wordpress oriented app Poster combined forces and, with a little bit of PDK magic, created one of the more robust cloud oriented pieces of content creation software available to any mobile platform. Think about it, guys.
We like apps, and now we’ve got more than 800 to choose from on the webOS App Catalog. Even better, of the few dozen apps that landed yesterday, not a single one of them was a sports app about a specific team or a recipe book with only a single cuisine. We got some more backgrounds and obscure albums; but we also got some nice stuff – like crosswords and BART schedules. All-in-all, a good day in app land, and it’s all listed after the break.