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Fifteen minutes of Flock

Friday October 21, 2005

As the title suggests it’s all about first impressions. That being, I reserve the right to change my mind.

I have to admit to letting out a sigh when I heard Flock was headed our way: oh no, not another bloody browser to contend with but that’s probably irrelevant, since it’s Mozilla-based anyway.

Interface

On OS X at least it’s clean, simple and unobtrusive and that makes me happy. Though something in me always wants to be blown away by a piece of UI high art, anyone who has opened Opera more than once will understand that in reality what we seek is simplicity, even if it doesn’t give us five minutes of “fuck me, Jon!” excitiment on first viewing.

Del.icio.us intergration

I am still not even sure how I feel about del.icio.us, I use it but actually I tend to use Google these days and bookmarks are something I very rarely consult.

The inbuilt bookmarks search is a great idea but I guess I must be crap at tagging because the results I got back weren’t great.

Within the browser you “Star a page” as opposed to bookmarking it, or adding it to your favourites but you still have favourites, which you can manage and then there is collections… So this bit is not meant for my Mum to use then!

Extensions

I had hoped the web devleoper toolbar would somehow work with Flock but alas it seems not. Firefox extensions working straight out of the box would have been a huge bonus but maybe I am being a little naive.

Blogging tools

It has blog publishing tools and a TypePad user I know confirms it works. It doesn’t work for Textpattern, though that comes as no suprise.

Actually, as a HTML zealot it make me feel slightly sick to stomach even using Textile—but I do so for speed—so any kind of WYSIWYG blog publishing tool I tend to steer clear of anyway.

Overall

Flock looks great and the whole del.icio.us, built in blog editor thing is a great idea. Fact is though I am happy with my Texpattern admin UI right now and my Remember This del.icio.us bookmarklet for Safari and Firefox works equally as well and is somewhat less confusing. So yes, I am sure it’s going to do really well, I like it but I doubt it’ll be my every day browser just yet.

  1. Richard Dunlop-Walters

    1034 days ago

    It still seems a little gimmicky to me. That said, I havn’t tried it yet.

    Just noticed I got the email, though. Good times ahead!

  2. Chris

    1034 days ago

    It needs… work.

  3. Josh

    1034 days ago

    Extensions do work in flock:

    http://extend.flock.com/

  4. Joshua Kendall

    1034 days ago

    Seems I will be waiting for a full release. Downloaded it, ran the setup, not a minute into a site and boom, a windows dialog saying that the program quit unexpectedly. Oh well I have Firefox atleast. :)

  5. quis

    1034 days ago

    Doesn’t seem like anything you could set up yourself with some extensions. And since this is aimed at “power-users” I suspect this is what most people will do. Be interesting to see how it gets on though…

  6. Reuben Whitehouse

    1034 days ago

    I’ve just downloaded the preview this morning and it seems nice in terms of the UI (speshly for a PC app). I’m not sure about the del.icio.us integration either – for me, the cool thing about web based apps like delicious, gmail, etc. is the fact that I can use them on any computer and have the same experience each time (not have to change / re-learn the way I do things). So integrating delicious this way kind of rules out one of the benefits of it for me.
    I’ll be interested to see if some of the extensions make it more useful than Firefox from a Developer point of view.

  7. Jaro

    1034 days ago

    Yes, some web developer extension is now available at http://extend.flock.com/details/webdeveloper.

    I would like to have del.icio.us integrated to the browser since I use it often to dynamically add links to my websites through the RSS.

  8. Vexeffexx

    1033 days ago

    But there is a del.icio.us extension for Firefox. :\

    Flock does sound good, but the overall persona? of it makes it seem like it’s pretty unprofessional. I haven’t tested it yet, but I will soon.

  9. Indranil

    1032 days ago

    Couldn’t Flock have been a really extensive extension instead of a whole new browser?

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