Flock is the latest “toy” in the geek world it seems. I’m not sure whether it will take off or not, but I grabbed a copy of the “developer preview” to try it anyway.
The linux install is simple. Grab the tarball. Unpack it and run the binary (you also get loads of interesting output in the terminal if you are that way inclined).
What does it offer?
Flock seems to be designed with the community element in mind. The toolbar invites you to blog:
The quill icon links into your existing blog(s) which is cute.
If the page you are viewing is a feed you get a slightly different display in the location bar:
It also defaults to using Yahoo in the search box.
Anything radical?
Well there is a WYSIWYG editor that will interface with your blog, so you can post from the browser without actually logging into your site . It supports basic text formatting and includes technorati tags, which is handy
It doesn’t seem to have support for including images in your posts, or if it does I can’t see it 🙂
Forget about the traditional concepts of “bookmarks” or “favorites”. Flock takes this to a new level.
Not only can you create a bookmark, but you can tag it, describe it and even share it via delici.us
You can also “blog” any links you find along the way.
It’s handling of RSS feeds is very interesting. If you spot a feed in the location bar you can click on it and be taken to a new view. The RSS view uses a very nice implementation of AJAX and allows you not only to read the feeds, but also to manipulate them as you do so. Want to read them in reverse order? Now you can.
Conclusions
The interface is quite attractive. You can see that it inherits all the elements of firefox that you’ve grown to love and it takes the user experience to a new level.
Maybe it is just a shiny new thing to play with, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to use.
I’ll probably experiment with it for a couple of days to see how it “fits”
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