While we await the release of webOS 2.0 and its promised QuickOffice suite (with upcoming editing features), let’s not forget that we already have a native word processing app for webOS: Scratch, by No Insult Software. Not only is Scratch already up to version 1.4.1, but it supports importing/exporting from Google Docs and offers features such as in-document search, text formatting (bold/italic/underline), "real paragraphs" and style sheets among others. It can be used for everything from quick (and easily exportable) notes to writing and editing long documents.

Even better, Scratch is on sale at $1 (a 75% discount) for the entire month of November, in honor of NaNoWriMo, aka National Novel Writing Month. While writing an entire novel on a thumbboard may be an overly ambitious (not to mention painful) project, given the confirmation that webOS 2.0 will finally include Bluetooth keyboard support, and its $1 sale price, Scratch should be a must-buy for anyone who is or might want to be a writer.

Source: PreCentral App Gallery

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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.

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After the lighter app drops, at least in the new apps category, that we saw in previous days, yesterday brought us a much beefier new apps list. We’ve got two new 3D games, with Skater Nation from Gameloft and the hilarious Family Guy: Uncensored from Glu Mobile. And plenty of other new stuff from a slew of other developers, and the usual bucket or two full of fresh hot updates. Oh, and did we mention that there’s now a text editor app for webOS? Find out for yourself, after the break.

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