Flock‘s latest version of their browser, Flock 0.9 was released this morning and I must say I love the new look.
The integration with sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us, and YouTube is great but there are still a couple of wrinkles to iron out.
For instance, there is a Feeds sidebar. You would imagine that if you are on a site which has a feed, you should be able to drag the site from the address bar to the sidebar and have it added. Not possible.
Also, there was a button on the button bar which, if you dragged an image over it, it opened the uploader for uploading the image to Flickr. That has been moved to the small Flock Toolbar and is easy to miss. It should be possible to add it back to the main toolbar.
I’d like to see some kind of FaceBook and Twitter integration there as well – they are the sites du jour at the minute.
The memory footprint certainly seems to have improved with this release which is good because previous releases were total resource hogs.
The idea of the Web Clipboard is an interesting one. I’ll have to see if I can get into using it.
The built-in blog editor is too bare bones to be of use though. It can’t see your blog categories, for instance. And i can’t get the Media Bar to open on my Mac (it opens fine on my Vaio) – no idea what is going on there.
Overall though, despite the criticisms above, this release is a big improvement and I’ll continue to use Flock (it is my default browser on Mac). Keep up the good work guys.
Hi Tom,
Good to see you’re still Flocking around. 🙂 Agreed that the new look is pretty nice. Just on the blog editing issue, maybe it’s only a WordPress problem as I can see the categories for my MovableType blog. However, it’s not straight up, you have to write and save the entry first and then it asks you what category you want. My one criticism of it would be that it does it’s own Technorati tagging logic from the tags field of the post rather than copying these into the corresponding tags field of MovableType which I had spent some time tweaking the code on to make them Technorati tags. Oh well! Overall though I’m very impressed so far but would like to see a few little things changed.
I’ve been using Flock for a while, mainly as my Feed Reader, rather than my default browser (that yo-yos between Firefox and Safari – can’t decide which I prefer!). The new look is nice, and it’s great for traacking feeds, but I’m finding it a bit slow. What’s the speed been like for you?
Jonathan, I forgot about the tagging of posts. I use a WordPRess plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior which reads my posts and suggests Tags! Until Flock can do that I’m sticking with the WordPress backend.
Damian – tbh, I hadn’t noticed any speed difference either way. It seems reasonably responsive and the memory problems do appear to have been improved.