Flock Update

sethjust — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:21:56 +0000

So I’ve been playing around with Flock a bit more, and I’ve discovered some more. I played with the webmail integration, which isn’t great… It just detects new messages and then sends you to the website. I’d appreciate if I could get POP or IMAP into the browser, but I can live with a separate desktop app.
As to Digg support, it’s supposedly going to be integrated into the next release. I’m trying to get my hands on the latest betas, but they have a nasty tendency to crash on my machine. Oh well.
I’ve also discovered that Flock supports a huge amount of Firefox Addons. I added my personal favorites Greasemonkey, Stylish, Stealther and AdBlock Plus.

Flock

sethjust — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:57:49 +0000

So, I’ve been trying out the Flock browser which is based on Firefox. However, it’s twist is that it’s designed to integrate with a bunch of different social services. I have it set up to work with my Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Photobucket accounts, as well as this Wordpress blog. It will also work with things like Twitter, del.icio.us. It also supports RSS feeds, which I’ve imported my whole set of feeds into. So far it’s replaced two applications on my desktop (Safari and NetNewsWire), and if I were to set it up with my email, I could get rid of a third.
It was very easy to set it up. I installed the 1Password plugin for it and fired it up. I was asked whether I wanted to import information from another browser, which let me grab EVERYTHING (bookmarks, cookies, history, saved passwords, etc.) from Safari. It auto-detected when I visited a site that it could integrate with (Facebook). However, to get it to add my Facebook I had to log out and then back in, which was a minor annoyance, but after that it worked perfectly. Getting my RSS feeds in was a bit harder, I had to export them from NetNewsWire as OMPL and then import them, but that was easy and quick.
If you ask me, it does its thing pretty well. It takes a bit of getting used to to use the social features, but in the end it’s a lot more polished to do it all through the one interface than to use a bunch of tools that are inconsistent. However, I miss a few things. First off, it’s slow. A lot slower than Safari and Camino, and even a bit slower than Firefox. However, so far I’ve put up with it because I like what it’s doing. The other quibble I have is that I keep wanting more integration. One notable hole is Last.fm integration, which would be wonderful, but it would also be nice to see my Digg friends in there, and be able to Digg stories.
Overall, I’d suggest that those with the time and curiosity to do so should install Flock and give it a try. It’s fun, and you might just like something.

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Flock Update

Flock