Flock (mostly) Rules.
So I have switched from Firefox to Flock recently. The reason is kind of interesting and ultimately ironic. See, I use(d) Netvibes as my start page for something around two years. Customizable, integrated podcast player, and handy widgets were the main reasons. I’ve heard people dismiss Netvibes as “too busy,” but for a guy with little-to-no life, I liked the busy feel. However, Firefox has some kind of bug or something- while Netvibes is loading the 50+ feeds across five tabs, if I try to do ANYTHING during that time, Firefox would crash. This includes clicking a feed item, changing tabs, marking any feed as read (something I started to do as I had less and less time to read all the feeds that I used to watch like a hawk when I was able to sit on the internet until 5 in the morning), opening a new tab separate from Netvibes, etc. It was lame, and it got on my nerves. On top of that, the memory leak problem (or fragmentation, or whatever) slowed my poor 1.4mhz Pentium M with 512MB of RAM to a crawl, and trying to do pretty much anything else after Firefox has been open for 15 minutes was unbearable.
I had tried Flock a while back and while I liked the idea, I didn’t think it was that great. But when I heard that the 1.0 beta was coming along, I decided to give it another shot. It had some new features, was supposedly more stable, and so on. So after using it for around two months, not only am I not going back to Firefox, but I don’t even use Netvibes anymore. Flock has managed to integrate almost everything I do into its interface. Here’s how/why I became a Flock convert:
The most prominent thing about Flock is the way it integrates many different accounts across the web. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube, Photobucket, Blogs, del.icio.us, and more have their features built into the browser. Flock stores your passwords and keeps you logged in. Where it changes from a convenience to being useful is the way you can actually use these accounts inside the browser.
Below the navigation buttons on Flock is where you can access all of Flock’s integrated features. The screenshot to the left (click to enlarge) shows the Flock sidebar with Twitter. As you can see, you can update from the sidebar, view the latest Tweets, check direct messages (with the little mail envelope), search for a specific person, and even create a post with a link to your current page with the Post Link button. This is all done from the People Bar, which is the little silhouetted person icon below the Forward button. The People Bar includes Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr. By moving to one of those tabs, you can see latest photos or videos that a friend has posted, upload photos and go right to a specific page (like a friend’s wall on Facebook). You can also view all of the People accounts in one stream, so you can see the latest Twitter updates, photo uploads, etc in one stream. The People Bar icon will glow orange when a new update has been posted on any of these accounts you are following.
Flock integrates photos and videos in a similar manner, which is the Media Bar, to the right of the People Bar icon. This opens a horizontal strip across the top of the browser. You can “bookmark” media streams. This includes Youtube channels, Facebook friends’ photo albums, and Flickr sets (anything from general friends’ uploads to specific tags). The Media Bar, like the People Bar, glows orange when there is a new addition to any of your Starred streams. You can also search Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Truveo, and Photobucket from the media bar, and see the results in the Media Bar.
Flock also includes a built-in RSS reader function, similar to Firefox’s (Flock IS based off Firefox, after all). Clicking the RSS icon to the right of the Media Bar icon opens the RSS Sidebar. This is one area where Flock does not do a whole lot with extra features. You can arrange and group your feeds, fiddle with some viewing options, and of course, mark feeds as read. It does allow you to mark a feed and save it, and these articles are kept in a separate group called imaginatively called Saved Articles. This is the one area where I actually miss Netvibes, because there is no integrated podcast player. It’s a damn shame. However, now that I have a portable MP3 player (a rather ancient 512MB Sandisk Sansa), I don’t listen to podcasts on my computer as much as I used to, and usually listen on the bus.
Your bookmarks/favorites are kept on the Favorites Sidebar. This includes your traditional bookmarks, but if you use a site like del.icio.us, it also gives you access to them from here. No screenshot necessary- it’s boring. Plus, as you can see from previous screenshots, I get to frequently-visited sites with a Bookmarks toolbar.
A bitchin’ feature built right into Flock is the Web Clipboard. You can drag pictures, any highlighted part of a page (including image and text), or whole website address to the Web Clipboard icon (or the open space at the top of the sidebar if it is open, and Flock stores it. This is REALLY helpful for bloggers. Instead of clogging up your tabs bar or bookmarks, you can store quotes, funny pictures, and/or interesting sites in this separate area for easy access later. This is made even easier by Flock’s built-in blogging tools.
It’s a little light on pretty-pretty interface, but Flock’s built-in blogging tools are really handy. Flock can sync and operate with Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, Wordpress, Xanga, and many types of self-hosted blogs. Anytime while using Flock, you can blog whatever you are looking at. Right-click on the page and choose “Blog This” from the context menu, and a box will pop up with your most common post-editing tools. You can also highlight select parts of a page and choose “Blog This,” and Flock will automatically quote and cite the page when the editor opens. You can open the Web Clipboard in the pop-up editor, as well as save and open drafts locally, which is nice but it would be really nice if it integrated even further and saved drafts on the actual blog. You can switch between Edit view, Preview view, and Source view, allowing you to tweak posts accordingly. It even lets you tag posts right in the editor, which is handy.
You can also store multiple blog accounts, letting you switch between them and choose where you are posting to. The “Blog This” option is all over Flock. Besides being in the context menu for everything during regular browsing, it is in the Media Bar and RSS reader, letting you blog interesting things you come across even faster.
A few other handy features of Flock include a custom start page showing your last visited pages along with new RSS and Media items, and a built-in Photo Uploader. You can choose photos from your hard drive, or drag photos right off a webpage to the Photo Uploader icon. The Photo Uploader box will open and you can upload single or batches of photos, tag them, add a description and notes, and post them to Flickr, Photobucket, or Facebook.
The hard part about Flock is remembering that it does all this stuff. It takes a little while to get out of the habit of going to all these pages individually and doing things the old fashioned way, but once you get used to it, you really are moving around the internet, getting updates, and getting things done much faster. And for a guy that only gets about five hours on the internet each weekday when he used to be plugged into it 24/7, it really helps me get all the things I need/want to do in a day done faster.
Overall, Flock is super-useful and pretty slick. The way it integrates all these accounts I use is great, and I love the feature set. But it’s not perfect. While it doesn’t suffer Firefox’s ever-expanding memory usage problem, it is still a little heavy on the resources (newer computers, naturally, need not worry- out of date poor suckers like me, maybe). The RSS reader is bland and the lack of an integrated podcast player sucks. Some accounts still have slight issues (for example, Photobucket doesn’t like to stay logged in), and the blogging tools are also a little bare and could be integrated a bit better. All in all, however, it is probably the most useful browser I’ve ever used, and I can’t wait for it to be improved upon even more. If you use any of the online accounts I’ve mentioned throughout this article, I highly recommend giving Flock a try and seeing if it improves your browsing experience as well.
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