Flock

I wrote Friday’s post and this one using Flock, a brand new browser that looks very interesting.

Flock is still very much in the beta testing stage but from my few hours’ playing with it, I can say that there are several features that I really like.

Flock is quite different to all of the other browsers I have ever used (Netscape, Internet Explorer, and currently Firefox), in the way it handles favourites or bookmarks. Flock does not save your bookmarks on your PC, but is designed to work with del.icio.us. When looking at any site you’d like to save, you click a little star icon to mark it as a Favourite. You are prompted to log in to your del.icio.us account, and the site is then saved as a del.icio.us bookmark. I’ve had a del.icio.us account for a little while now, and have been using it to categorise the posts on this blog, but I can now see more of a use for it as a bookmarking tool, especially if I start using Flock to do my browsing. (The people at Flock remind us that it’s still in testing, so it’s likely to crash from time to time. I suppose the final first release could also be quite different from the version I am playing with. I wish I was a programmer – I’d love to be able to play with the code and contribute that way. I’ll just have to be content to fiddle.)

A minor gripe I have with the way Flock handles existing bookmarks is that it allows importing from Internet Explorer, but not from Firefox. I haven’t used IE in yonks so I have no IE bookmarks to import! (I wonder how Flock handles imported IE favourites – does it put them straight into del.icio.us?)

Flock is also the first browser I have ever played with that lets you blog directly from your browser. (Ok, rephrase that.) Many bloggers will be using a browser to blog – you log in to your blog provider and type away – but where Flock differs is that it actually has blogging tools built in to the browser, and as they say, it “talks to your blog account and handles all your blogging from one window”. Once you have entered your log in details you can just blog away. The Flock blog window has most of the main html options: bold and italics, size up and size down, ordered and unordered lists, indents, and add links. (There’s one last icon with the letters ‘abc’ on it but I have no idea what it does.)

It also links directly to Flickr and lets you find and drag any public Flickr photos straight into your blog post (don’t forget to give credit where credit’s due, of course!).

This is one of mine – kangaroo at the Perth Zoo.

I really love the tagging option – the Flock blog post window has a section on the right of the screen that allows you to tag your post. The tags are added directly to your post – for me that means that I no longer need to use the Technorati/del.icio.us bookmarklet to categorise my posts. You may have noticed that the categories listing at the bottom of Friday’s and this post was a lot smaller than usual, and instead of ‘categories’, the listing was ‘technorati tags’. This change was thanks to Flock’s tagging option.

Another minor gripe I have is that if you save your post as a draft (which in my case saves my drafts on blogspot) and forget to tag it first, there is no way (that I can see) of opening the draft up again in Flock’s blogging window to add the tags. I suppose that’s where the bookmarklet will continue to come in handy.

You can see how much Flock has been designed with blogging in mind, because it also has a feature that allows you to pull out text from any webpage and turn it into a quote for blogging about.

So far, so good. I’ll keep playing with it.

Edit: Another gripe – using the Flock blog tool, my posts are published with the time I started the post, not the time I actually hit publish. (The Blogger Word plug-in gets this right.) I edited the posting time for this post, but didn’t realise this on Friday.

technorati tags: Flock, browser, blogging, delicious, tagging, Flickr, gripes