i have been trying a new browser - flock. and i think i am going to switch over to using it from firefox...
if you blog, use del.icio.us, flickr and a news reader all of these are integrated into flock in a very smart way.
first up, when you switch from firefox or whatever it imports your favourites, bookmarks, and toolbar.
then the first thing you notice if you have a flickr account is that either your photos, your contacts photos or even better any new photos from your contacts are on a strip at the top. it scrolls easily along and you can lose it at any point... it really is good. you can also look at the strip of photos in two sizes.
if you put in your blog account details, click a button and you can blog directly in the window that opens (in both wysiwyg and html). and what is particularly sweet is that you can drag any photo with a choice of sizes from the flickr bar at the top. this is genius... i can't remember if i have said this before but if you don't use flickr to upload your own photos you can still blog anyone's photos if you sign in as a member as long as you link back to that flickr page (this way of dragging photos writes that code for you). of course you can do the same with photos from your computer and all the usual things.
if you follow blogs an other web sites in a newsreader you can do that from the browser (other browsers do this too). click on the feed symbol in the address bar and a sidebar appears that you can add the feed to. then arrange them in folders as you like and save any entries as articles for future reference. now that wireless is available so much more, having this all integrated into one place makes a lot of sense. you don't have to open another programme and update and so on... it just all happens. the interface is great.
if you also like to save your favourite sites either as bookmarked favourites or on something like del.icio.us so that others can access them then the beauty of flock is that it integrates the two. add something as a favourite and it gets added to your del.icio.us page as well as bookmarked. sadly this doesn't seem to be working properly for me yet on the mac version. i'm sure it will get resolved. but it will be very good when it works properly. it just makes perfect sense. it is also very simple. in the address bar is a blue star. click it and it turns orange to show it is a favourite. double click it and a box opens where you can add description, tags, and choose favourite folders for it to go in.
it has good search bar tools much like firefox and to cap it all includes a very neat flickr uploader. you can upload individual photos with descriptions, tags, as a set and so on. and all of the interfaces look good, the speed is fast. in short it is brilliant. i have only been trying it for three days and it has crashed once. it is in beta so i guess some bugs are to be expected but browsing just got a whole lot smarter.
it is available for pc and mac btw and is free. click on any of these screen shots and you'll see what it looks like and the various bits i refer to
Yes, It's all going very well so far, but it won't let me add to my news feeds.
Was hoping to do away with Firefox and NetNewsWire in one go.
Posted by: Mike R | June 21, 2006 at 01:53 PM
Yes, its alright, I've got it now. Sorry - senior moment.
Posted by: Mike R | June 21, 2006 at 01:56 PM
jonny - quite the find. i like the interface...the only thing i miss is with bloglines, it only shows me my feeds that have been updated, so i can quickly find new posts - not sure how to do that with flock. but it's hot, you're very right on that. i might be making the switch too.
Posted by: Adam | June 21, 2006 at 05:35 PM
Jonny What you do not point out or have missed is that Flock is based on Firefox. It is an example of where the elements from one open source project have been integrated into another that evolves in a specific direction.
Posted by: Richard | June 21, 2006 at 10:59 PM
a decent enhancement on the current firefox version that i am running. The only fustration is that it doesn't seem to recognise the Camino browser that most of my cookies are in so I am having to remember all of my passwords and transfer them over...tsk....and I thougth technology was out to make things easier....
Warm Regards
John
Posted by: John Cooper | June 23, 2006 at 09:20 AM
Cheers Jonny... downloading now... will be after some tips next week
Posted by: Mark Berry | June 23, 2006 at 06:59 PM
Been using it this evening... like it! It seems a bit buggy at the moment... (particularly the newsreader) but I'm sure future releases will resolve things.... IMHO the Blog interface is not as functional as Ecto, so I'll probly keep using that. I will certainly give it an extended test run and may well shift over permanently from Firefox once the bugs are combed out.
Posted by: Mark Berry | June 24, 2006 at 12:39 AM
Much better than the version I tried about a year back.
Top tip on the RSS feeds: the default is set to refresh (look for new posts etc.) every hour, which may be too long for some. You can control this (which you can't so much in Safari) by following the tip here:
http://wiki.flock.com/index.php?title=Tips_and_tricks#Change_how_often_feeds_refresh
As you can see, by typing in "about:config" to the address bar, you get full control over a stack of stuff, which is great.
Posted by: Kester | June 24, 2006 at 02:45 PM
nice one Kester
Posted by: Mark Berry | June 25, 2006 at 08:37 PM