flock hands-on test
There was a brief mention of Flock on these pages a few weeks ago, but after a fortnight of using it - we can now give a fairer assesment of it.
You may be a contented user of IE or Firefox and are wondering why so many people have been talking and getting excited about this product. Even though it's based on the same code-base as Firefox it does differ greatly in many ways.
Flock is a new browser (that's still undergoing preview testing) which has been designed with a number of asset sharing tools that have integrated into the browser. (the developers have dubbed this social browsing); What this means is that tools for sharing your photos and bookmarks are integrated into the browser from the outset, and publishing to your blog has been reduced to a one-click action. Although the supported services are quite limited at the moment, the developers do promise to expand on this.
On firing up the browser for the first time you are prompted for your credentials for online sharing services such as Flickr, del.icio.us etc. These can be skipped over if desired and you can use the browser in the normal way - but if you do not have accounts with these services you may fail to see what is so great about Flock.
So how do the sharing tools stack up?
Bookmark Sharing: Flock makes this really easy, by compressing your del.icio.us publishing actions to the star button (this can optionally be set to prompt for tag information also). A great addition - as this is usually a slow process. Of the three flagship sharing features - this is the most stable and advanced at this date.
Photos: So far this feature seems to have most promise, although it seemed that not all aspects are fully functional. Once you have supplied your user id, you can navigate your photo bar across the top menu bar - with the option of publishing straight from the browser (The current build only seems to allow viewing so I imagine this is still a work in progress).
Blogging: This feature appeared to be a bit too temperamental to give a fair round up, but on entering the URL, user and password, the appropriate API is setup to enable you to one click publish to your blog. A clever feature is the ability to select text and from the contextual menu to select to 'blog this' - well thought and time saving! But for extended use, is soon becomes apparent that this tool is still in early stages of development - so use with care (I almost lost a few posts in the process of testing this...!)
Overall: For a pre-release build, this is a promising product, and when a fully stable release is ready - this shall be re-visited.
(build tested v0.4.9)
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, November 08, 2005 at 8:25 pm.
