Inverted Reality

I’ve been using Flock at work now since I blogged earlier about it.

Flock is a new web browser (for Mac, Linux and Windows) that has bounced onto the scene and is geared towards those who are into social networking web sites and media. I’m going to talk about some of the neat things that (in my opinion) makes Flock worth the download.

Firstly, if your on Facebook (who isn’t now?) then Flock is automatically going to make you smile. The way Flock integrates with the Facebook frame work is pretty damn good. Really good in fact.

The first thing I noticed when I fired up Flock is the “fluffy” tool bars and menus. It kind of looks like a ‘themed’ Firefox. (Note that Flock is actually based on Mozilla). There are a series of small icons in the top left that ‘indent’ when you mouse hover over them. Each icon serves a purpose and will provide some form of functionality that Flock offers.

The first icon is “my world”. This icon, when clicked, fires up a landing page, sort of a default home page. I ignored it at first, however it’s really starting to grow on me. “my world” loads up in Flock when you first open the browser. I’m sure you could turn it off if you choose. You can fully customize “my world” if you like, but basically it gives you a nice view of your RSS feeds, social networking site activity, media activity, etc. EG. Friend activity on Facebook, your favorite media channels (youtube, facebook photos, etc). My world also has a Google search facility built in, the ability to quickly post to any one of your blogs, or upload media to any number of subscribed services.

The second icon is “People”. When clicked a side menu appears which lists your friends/subscribers, etc to which ever services you have defined in Flock. For me I setup my Facebook account and my Youtube account. I can display one or ALL. In my Facebook view, it displays all of my friends in a list, their avatar, status, when their status was last altered and some options to view their media and perform an action like poke, message, give gifts, and of course ’share flock’. I find I have my Flock web browser running in this mode 90% of the time. It’s refreshed frequently and even displays an indicator when one of your friends changes their media, very cool.

The Third icon in the toolbar is the “media bar”. Clicking this will open another frame at the top of your browser and display your favorite media. You can configure this to use Facebook, flickr, photobucket, picasa, Truveo or Youtube. It’s easy to add favorites, channels, etc. very handy for quickly looking at your friends facebook pics, youtube vids, or flickr galleries, or even just browsing some random stuff. Very neat! You can also search from the media bar which is very handy for youtube! If you like youtube, you will LOVE this.

There are a pile more icons to discuss, I’ll make mention of them quickly in one hit…
The “feeds sidebar” is kind of obvious, it displays your rss subscriptions, nice and easy, I like it!
The “webmail” icon lets you interface with your yahoo mail or Gmail. It’s a real pity that there is no option to configure your own webmail in this button, perhaps just some kind of imap reader or something.
The “favorites” icon opens a sidebar that does the obvious. Displays your favorite sites.
The “accounts and services” icon opens a sidebar that allows you to configure all of your services so Flock can interface. A must do!
The “Web Clipboard” sidebar is pretty neat, you can drag and drop text, links and images here to save them for later. It’s extremely handy and people who like to copy/paste or store snippets of things will love it. I find it useful when testing web forms or doing some web coding.

“Open Blog Editor” icon, is what I’m typing this from now. The blog editor is great, simple, easy to use and supports a variety of blog platforms. I keyed in the credentials to some of my wordpress blog’s and I’m banging posts up nice and fast. The editor integrates with the web clipboard, allows you to open previously saved posts. Has a WYSIWYG and source editor and even a preview function. You can of course also add tags for your posts. Simple and well thought-out. I’ll be using this a lot! When you fire up the blog editor, write, then publish, if you have multiple blogs defined, it will ask you which one you’d like to post to. Providing your default choice first. There are a few other options you can enable or disable like a checkbox that asks if you want to display a “blogged with Flock” link in your post. I’ve been leaving it enabled, I’m not bothered by it cos I think Flock is pretty good.

Last but not least, the “photo uploader” icon. Pretty neat drag and drop facility for uploading media to your favorite site. Mine is configured for facebook. I don’t have a flickr account because I manage my own photo galleries, but other photo sites are certainly supported as mentioned earlier. Drag and drop your pics to this little widget and let it’s smarts do all the work! Integrates very well to popular photo sites!

Conclusion:
Flock isn’t for everyone, in fact if your not into social networking and/or media, it’s not for you. Be aware you don’t have to be a big social network site user to enjoy flock. It really is fantastic even if just for flickr, youtube, your webmail, etc.

Because I’ve only installed the windows version of Flock on my work PC I cannot comment on how the Mac or Linux version runs. I’m more of a Mac user than any however haven’t had the chance to install Flock on one of my Macs for testing. Perhaps I’ll do that and report back (Linux too!)

I recommend that you give Flock a look. I only tried it because I saw all the internet advertising for the browser and was curious. I don’t normally try stuff I see in internet ads however this one just caught my eye.

I think Flock is a great addition to the already existing browsers available. Even if it is just a ‘fluffy’ firefox. I almost forgot to mention, Flock is open source and you can contribute to the development

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: webbrowser, Flock, Mozilla, Firefox

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