Wow… this is really sweet. I’m writing it in Flock 0.5.
What is Flock? Flock is a new web browser developed by people from Round Two based on Mozilla Firefox 1.4.
It’s a social browsing experiment which is just an expanding of what we did with Google. Adding functionality of some web services into the browser so the user can use the power of social ideas like del.icio.us, Flickr or Technorati within the browser.
The first impression after launching it is “Oh my! It’s so polished!”. Believe me, Firefox, Opera, IE…. they just look bad comparing to this. And I’m not trying to say that everyone must like this style. But this is the way, that browsers of the future must go. It looks… Appelish… It does what it should, you don’t even notice that. You click on something, and it’s there.
It looks that the policy where one team focuses on engine, another on browser and yet another on polishing the user experience of this browser works.
Anyway· You probably want to just read what the Flock is, or… head to a few of snapshots I made…
Ok. So the very short tour here:
Screenshot 0:
This is the default view of Flock browser window. It’s similar to Firefox yet much more polished. The third icon in the address toolbar (with a pen) opens a small window with textarea and some UI so you can easly write a blog post. Next icon opens Favorites Manager in current tab.
In Flock the list of Favorites (bookmarks) is called Collection and you can have many of them. First favorites from your list will appear on the favorites toolbar (the one below address toolbar) and using the switcher on the right (the one with ‘default’ name) you can switch between collections. Neat.
The star button on the left of location bar allows you to easly add current site to your favorites. And it’ll appear also on del.icio.us. Neat x 2.
Tip: watch where is the close tab icon in Flock.
Snapshot 1:
About window
Snapshot 2:
This is context menu of Star button. View on the web moves you to del.icio.us.
Snapshot 3:
Favorites menu.
Snapshot 4:
Tools menu. Yes, extensions works here… You can download them from here.
Snapshot 5:
What is a shelf? It’s the idea I read about for the first time a few weeks ago on Kollaboration forums and what Microsoft tried to implement in some Office. It seems to be not working yet, but the idea is that it opens small window where you can drag&drop anything you want. Just a shelf 😉
Screenshot 6:
This is what appears when you click on manage Favorites button. As you can see, you can store your favorites using tags, collections or history. Important – there is no other history in this browser other than the one you can find here. There is also no such thing as Sidebar there. Expanding any address will give you the list of feeds from there.
Snapshot 7:
Here you can see tags in Favorites menu
Snapshot 8:
When you click on the blue pen icon it’ll open this window and allow you to blog something. When you click on “Blog this” from context menu of some site, it’ll open this window and link the site there.
Snapshot 9:
Flock preferences. Not much to see here. All main options are the same as in Firefox 1.5, and in Blogging you just can configure the blog accounts and notifications, and in Web Services favorites and photo sharing. Simple as that.
Snapshot 10:
Another fresh idea is Topbar. In view menu, you can click on Topbar (in place of Firefox’s Sidebar) and open Flicker photos in this topbar. You can scroll them using side buttons. You can also load any picture in the main window by clicking on it’s thumbinal.
Snapshot 11:
Or you can select blog topbar and open this. It will show last posts on last blogs from your del.icio.us and allow you to manage them.
Snapshot 12:
And yet another one is extended searchbox. It displays suggestions as you type, and those are combined from your history and favorites. Very usable.
Snapshot 13:
Once you click on rss feed button on the right of location bar, it displays the RSS feed in the nice skin. This was going to happen in Firefox 1.5 too (and there is extension for that), but beacuse of some errors we moved the plan to Firefox 2.0. Now you can use it in Flock. 🙂
That’s all floks. I hope you like it 🙂
I’m really curious about how the market will react now. Firefox seems to be moving into the same direction for 2.0, what about others?
10 replies on “Flock 0.5 – short tour”
Actually Shelf does work, try selecting a part of a website or an image and dragging it to the shelf. Then click the “new blog post” button and drag stuff from the shelf into the editor window.
BTW, I love Flock and some of my observations are also available on http://patrys.wordpress.com/
Not polished enough… toolbar buttons are usability nightmare. All in the same color and shape, hard to recognize with short glimpse. They’re more as horrible as Konqueror ones (less colors), but there are fewer them than in Konq.
I’m trying out Flock 0.5 and the shelf feature is actually working. You can drag’n’drop pictures, texts, etc. to it and easily post it.
Patrys: it works on Windows only then…
What makes you think PLD Developers use Windows? 😀
gandalf: not, it works on Linux too. I mean on Ubuntu 5.10 (GNOME). Maybe it’s not usable when you use KDE?
ah! Right, maybe it’s a matter of KDE :/
[…] It seems that every geek worth his or her salt is giving Flock a spin. In case you’re not a geek, or have been buried up to your neck in Ruby code, or (God forbid!) offline for a few days, Flock is a pre-release Firefox-based browser that ties into “social” web-based tools like Flickr, del.icio.us, newsfeeds and various blogging platforms. In fact, it does a great job of tying all these things together. For example, you can tag something as a favourite site, and it appears in your online del.icio.us list, which can appear in your blogroll. Meantime, a click on the built-in blog editor and a special toolbar means you can select one of those Flickr images your posted recently and write a blog post about it, publishing it automatically. It auto-discovers most feeds, lets you read them (or even combine various feeds together) in a nice ad-free environment, and –of course– blog about them. Throw in a nice little tie-in to the new blogging service WordPress.com (a free account!), and you have yourself a handy little tool for wrapping yourself in the interactive glory that is Web 2.0. (For a nice little guide of its features, see a short tour at stream of thoughts.) […]
[…] Nie będę się rozposywał o tym co Flock potrafi, bo o tym najlepiej przeczytać w tekście Gandalfa. Dodam tylko, że jedna rzecz mnie piekielnie irytuje – skróty umieszczone na pasku “Favorites” nie dają się kliknąć TPM, więc nie można ich otworzyć w nowym tabie :/ Reszta spisuje się na tyle dobrze, że Flock został moją domyślną przeglądarką. Na czas testów, może dłużej. […]
[…] A short tour of Flock. Even after using Flock for like a week, I hadn’t explored enuf to know all these features existed! Real awesome! § […]