Flock and WordPress.com

Flock is a new “social” browser based on Firefox, meaning it integrates blogging and bookmarking (del.icio.us). There’s a host of other features on top of the Firefox goodies. I like the idea of the Shelf, a repository of links and images that you drag and drop to and can save for later (blogging)

Blogging and WordPress.com
Flock supports WordPress, TypePad, Blogger. Incidentally, WordPress.com which is the hosted arm of the powerful blogging tool is also invite-only. Getting Flock allows you to get an account. It’s pretty interesting, basically you have to go to http://wordpress.com/flock/ but the page checks for your browser version heh. WordPress is probably one of the best blogging platform I’ve tried, very juicy. The integration to WordPress.com as far as setup is okay but I tried posting and it could sure use more feedback (you click publish and it works but you wouldn’t know it).. I’d rather just use the WordPress interface right now

deli.icio.us
To add a bookmark to del.icio.us, double-click on the new star button. I don’t think that’s gonna work because the del.icio.us bookmarklet that I’m used to takes you to your account and has all the fancy suggestion for tags, very necessary. I guess the idea is to have Flock and del.icio.us tightly integrated and seemless but I feel less in control of my bookmarks

A really big annoyance is how Flock handles the toolbar bookmarks. Anything added there via drag-n-drop is automatically added to del.icio.us. It’s a huge pain in the ass because it kinda messes up my del.icio.us bookmarks (repeat) so I end up havint to manually remove them from del.icio.us. Furthermore, the url cannot be edited in Flock so for something like Yahoo! Mail which has an unsightly url like http://us.f328.mail.yahoo.com/ym/us/ShowLetter?box=Inbox&logi…, it’s basically not possible to change that to http://mail.yahoo.com

The jury is out on this

Flickr
Flickr is listed under web services but all you get is a “topbar” under the blogging window which lets you load pictures from the photo sharing site. You can look for pictures under username but tag woulda been a better choice

Flock vs Firefox UI
Flock sports a different skin/theme that’s more shiny and fancy, I’m not sure I’m sold but that’s more cuz I’m used to my Firefox icons or what not.

My first gripe is on the forward/back buttons, Firefox has a cool sub-button that shows a list of pages to jump to rather than click repeatedily. The “close tab” button which was moved from the tab itself to the upper right corner of the tab bar since Firefox 1 iirc is a bit confusing/hard to get re-acustomed to. Also missing from Firefox 1 is the ability to right-click or middle-click on a toolbar link which means you need to create a new tab then click on the link to have it open in its own tab. Ugh

In general the interface seems to react a tad slower than Firefox as well. I find it a bit weird that the default search bar is set to Yahoo! but you can change that with a couple of clicks (the other engines provided are Google, Amazon, eBay, Technorati and Wikipedia). Flock is missing the ability to reorder tabs as you browse, which is a new feature from Firefox 1.5 beta

Verdict
It’s been getting a lot of buzz with the private beta or what not. Version 0.5pre is out for all to download, source code is available for ultra geeks to play with if they so desire. I’m gonna give it a week and see what’s what

Download Flock 0.5pre (build 0.4.8) 7.3 MB