• November 27th, 2007
• Joseph Crawford
• 7:47 PM (GMT-5)
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• I Flock
• Giving Flock Another Try
• New BrowserReports.Com Feature
• Vista PreRC1 vs OS X 10.4.6
• Flock 0.7.10.1 Released
• Lack of Updates
• Upgraded to WordPress 2.1
• Microsoft Vista Prices Revealed
• PHP and the MVC pattern
• My Resume

It has been a while since I last used Flock.  In the past I stopped using it because I felt that the blogging editor needed a lot of improvements.  I would have liked to see a full WYSIWYG editor rather than the simple editor that they offered.  Today I decided that I would download the latest version 1.0.1 and see what improvements they had made.  To my surprise I found that they had actually done a lot with the browser.  There have been quite a bit of features added to it.

Flock has definately come a long way and I look forward to seeing where they go from here.  I will be using this browser again for a while and see if I can force myself to get used to the blogging editor.  If you have not tried Flock, I suggest you go download it and give it a test run, it is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.  Now let’s move on to discuss some of the cool new features.

My World

This is a page that will display a lot of important content.  You can access this by typing about:myworld in the address location bar or by clicking on the icon in the Flock tool bar.  This page is setup to show you all of your recently viewed favorites, your news feeds and your favorite media streams.  With all of this content on one page they did a good job using a 3 column layout to organize it nicely.

Accounts & Services Sidebar

Flock was created to integrate with some web services such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and many others.  You can login to one of the supported services Flock will remember the account.

People Sidebar

This really comes in handy when you are logged into services like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, etc.  When you login to one of these services Flock will recognize it and you will be able to take advantage of the People Sidebar.  You can share photos, videos, feeds and text from the Media Minibar or web pages with your friends just by dragging and dropping.  You can interact with your friends instantly by jumping to their profile, sending messages and more.  When you see a friend listed in the People Sidebar you can load their photos and videos in your Media Minibar just by clicking on their media icon.

Media Minibar

This is where you can load up your photos or videos from media streams that you have.  You can also use this Minibar to view your friends media.  This comes in very handy when you need to access your photos on flickr or your videos on YouTube.

Feeds Sidebar

Flock has even incorporated a sidebar for you to use to view all of the RSS Feeds you are subscribed to.  Basically this sidebar is just an organized Favorites for your RSS feeds.  It shows you how many new articles there are for each feed.  When you click on a feed it will open in a new tab so that you can read all of the updated articles.

Favorites Sites Sidebar

Unlike most browsers Flock is setup to use online services so this is not only for your local favorites but this will also show your online favorites that you have stored on services like del.icio.us

Web Clipboard Sidebar

This is by far the coolest feature in my opinion.  This sidebar has an image of a square with dashed lines as the border.  With this sidebar open you can be on any web page and drag text, links and images over to the sidebar and they will be saved for later use.  You can use things in the clipboard on blog posts, whatever you want really.  It’s just a way of saving things for later use and comes in VERY handy.

Blogging Editor

In Flock you can setup a blogging account either at any of the many supported free online blog services or you can set it up to use your self-hosted blog.  Flock allows you to open an editor window and just start typing away.  You never have to actually login to your blogs admin interface to submit a new post.  THere are downfalls to this editor however.  Over the time I had stopped using Flock until this release I really do not see much progress has been made on the blogging editor.  I would love to see it enhanced even more so that I would not have to go to my site to upload my images in the admin panel.  I would also LOVE to see a full WYSIWYG editor.