Scrappy upstart browser Flock has been the subject of examination by Crashpod in the past, but the development team behind this social-collaboration apparatus has continued to refine and polish their product, thus introducing truly worthwhile features into an already promising piece of software.
I’ll be honest and say that while I really liked the idea of what the team was rolling into Flock, it hadn’t yet earned a permanent place on my dock or quicklaunch bar. This has recently changed though, as Justin suggested I give their latest release, 0.7 a try.
What made all the difference is that I’m using Flock on a PC now, rather than my Mac. Speed has always been an issue on Apple’s PowerPC computers, and I’ve consistently found that Mozilla browsers like Firefox and Flock just can’t keep up with Safari, which undoubtedly enjoys great optimization benefits as it’s developed in house with OSX.
On a PC however, the extra gigabytes, gigahertz, gigaeverything levels the playing field. So with IE7, Firefox, and Flock all performing equally well, the extended feature-set of Flock really stands out. Blog setup with the 0.7 release is as simple as always, just input your URL, login, and blog platform and Flock hits the ground running. What’s seen a generous amount of polish since my last look at Flock has been the Flickr and RSS integration: this is where Flock starts to make IE7 and Firefox show their age.
Flock provides a full front-end interface for Flickr, that means uploading photos, browsing existing libraries, and notification of image additions are all handled in Flock, rather than requiring the user to visit Flickr directly. One thing I’d like to see revised further is the manner in which photostreams are browsed: right now navigating forward or backward through a stream moves a rather large set of photos. That’s great for moving through a photoset, but there should also be the option to scroll just one image at a time: it prevents the need to scrub back and forth for images that are close to each other in the stream.
Integrating Flickr so successfully is a great addition to Flock, but what really sold me this time is the Excellent RSS reader that’s included with the browser, effectively ending my search for a good RSS app on Vista. Flock’s RSS page has a ton of customization features, including the ability to list stories in 2 columns with full resolution images, which is really gorgeous on a widescreen display. Add to a great “front page” feature that shows you a sample of the latest stories from each of your RSS categories, and a “save for later” button which helps you track stories you want to read in the future, and RSS in Flock really stands out from the crowd.
So once again, if you haven’t tried Flock, give it a shot: it’s a great (and free!) product that brings many cutting edge web technologies together in one truly worthwhile package.
