Quick App: Scratch 28
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.
28 Comments
Thinking........................... Ok I would buy it!
Haha, Robert, I love how your battery is always completely drained on every screenshot for every app review you do. :) Great stuff!
Cant microsoft with its billions of dollars of money make an office suit for web OS? Why do we have to be dependent on dataviz?
This also goes to show, that if a single developer can make an app like that for web OS (I wonder how long it took him), that a big institution like dataviz can spend few weeks in making one for webOS as well.
This is developers comment on the latest update: "At the cost of just about all of my weekend, I updated scratch with a crazy amount of new features and changes. So crazy, in fact, that I actually skipped over 1.2.0 and went right to 1.2.1. (As it turns out, coding all weekend sometimes introduces embarrassing bugs that you don
Thanks for the review. Rich text editing with a backup solution. All for 5 bucks? I'm off to buy this app NOW!!!
I too am off to purchase it right now! This is a welcome site after the gloomy news of Docs2Go yesterday! Hope the Dev continues to add some great features to this! Maybe it'll become the new Wordsmith of PalmOS.
hey
I bought it yesterday. I've only barely used it (life as a dad is busy! Planting tree on Earth day with one daughter, helping usher at High School play with another daughter...) but I created a quick doc, and sent it to Google Docs. And it is there! Now, I need to learn what can be done with it from that point. Can I edit it in Google Docs and send it back to the Pre? Is there a manual? I'd love to learn those shortcuts.
Totally agree. LOVE this app. It's replaced the Memo app for me.
I don't use Wordpress anymore so I don't care about that, but if he could work in a really good spell check....
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
"...But you know what, it's really not steep."
"WEBFELLOW", you are right. We paid more in the PDA days and didn't complain at all. It may the price we'll need to pay to get developers to look at making apps for the Palm devices. Even for just 1 million users, five bucks looks a lot better to a potential developer than 99 cents. Especially, in a less crowded app market (WebOS) where a good app will get a much higher adoption rate.
C
Anyone having issues importing from Google Docs? I export just fine but when I go to import, it just does an endless spinning circle indefintiely every try. If I can get this to work, I'm super thrilled with the app!
There's a bug in the google docs api--it stopped returning any entries to a query for documents.
Google says they have a fix on the way, but I just submitted an update with a workaround, and much better error reporting.
I love community-oriented devs. Thanks for listening. I've already bought your app.
Thanks for telling me about this. It looks great!
An excellent free alternative to this that's been around for quite a while is the homebrew app classicNote. What it lacks in cloud synchronization it makes up with the ability to export to e-mail and a database that's relatively easy to back up. Both apps look to be quite useful.
I've got both the paid "Scratch" and free "ClassicNote" apps. ClassicNote would be a superior application if it synced with Google Docs, which of course, it doesn't.
Scratch is worth the $5 admission except that it promises the importation of docs from Google Docs but doesn't yet deliver. You can see it's set up to import, but like many others have noted, for some reason this feature is not working. For now Scratch uploads to Google Docs perfectly. It is the downloading that is needed for a true solution as importing is the only way to get data back to your phone if the data is ever lost. Until this feature is fixed the idea of a "cloud backup" is just that, an idea.
I appreciate what Scratch is trying to do. It's almost there.
And, again, the "importing from Google Docs" problem is at Google's end, and the fix appears to be in the pipeline.
I ponied up my $5!
If you paid attention to what was said above and also by the developer, the Google Docs feature worked perfectly until Google broke the API. They have admitted breaking it and are expecting to have a fix soon. Stop making the wrong person suffer because you're not willing to take the effort to be informed.
I don't own Scratch, but a comment made in this review got my hackles up. It actually bothers me every time I see similar statements here and in reviews in the App Catalog. Robert said "There
That's one 'baaaa-d posting govotsos! ;)
I agree, we have to reward developers who are trying to give us what we want and need.
You know what I would like to see (and it might have been done already, I should search the forums), is see what kind of revenue per capita the webOS app store makes vs. the iPhone app store. You know, what is the average contribution of a webOS user ordering apps vs. the contribution of an iPhone user ordering apps. Does that make sense? I'm guessing the webOS users contribute more per person.
I absolutely love what you said here. You should post it on Facebook. Seriously. :)
Bravo govotsos!
I couldn't agree more! Was just on my way make a similar post, but can't say it better than you have here. I'm going to print this out, frame it and put it on the wall in my entry-way.
I was a DataVis user with my Treo 600 & 650 (which is still kickin with it's AMAZING battery life) and am happy to see this "program" from a developer with this attitude.
I'm off to buy Scratch right now... :)
P.S. So nice to see a forum full of 'thinkers'. Even if I don't agree with some of you this is quite refreshing.
I anticipated a Data Viz product's price to be in the 20+ range. Maybe I missed it but, was there a discussion somewhere involving PreCentral members quoting 99 cent pricing for a WebOS based Docs to Go?
Govotsos,
Guess you feel strongly about this topic! Well said. So yes, if the app is useful then it's easily worth 10x more. If epocrates cost $50, I would buy it since it's invaluable in my work and transforms a phone into a useful tool. So yes, buy the good apps and support the webos community. I heard that webos apps are not as easily pirated as other platforms- that's great foresight from Palm. The webos community cannot afford to weaken developer support in any way!
For me, this app was the best thing to come out of the major downer that was the DataVis announcement yesterday. I saw a reference to Scratch in the comments and immediately searched the App Catalog and purchased. Much gratitude to this developer for bringing real document editing to WebOS!
Damn! I feel ya brother! I remember paying $30 for apps back in the day like Agendus. That app kicked butt, and was worth the price. What incentive does DataViz have to make a word editing app when they know charging $15 is gonna get most people in an uproar. They won't get a return on their investment with as little people that there are who own the Pre/Pixi, and a higher price would be worth it. I know alot of people that would buy the Pre if it weren't for the lack of a doc editor too. I guess Palm is stuck in a catch 22.
It's not so much that I feel strongly about Apple users - if they want to bend over and say thank you, I just really don't think we need to take it in the end too.