Trying out Flock
I’m trying out Flock (a ‘social web browser’) following a recommendation from Martin Polley as a way of integrating ma.gnolia bookmarking into the browser. My timing was poor, because there’s a problem at the moment with posting bookmarks to ma.gnolia from Flock because of a temporary problem at ma.gnolia’s end. However, I tried it out with de.icio.us, and it was a pretty seamless process.
I’m not quite sure what to make of Flock. Martin said that it’s a kind of love it or hate it thing, and I can see what he means. If you use a lot of social software (flickr, social bookmark sites, facebook and so on), the integration features are pretty good. You can even blog direct from Flock, which is what I’m doing right now (all being well…). I also like the Web Clipboard, which lets you drag on links, text and images, then drag them on to other services or into a blog post. I can see that if you use Flock for everything, it’s really handy to collect everything in one place for easy posting.
But.
The interface isn’t bad, but it’s pretty cluttered after you’ve been used to the minimalism of Safari. It also seems slower to render pages, and seems to like popping up endless warnings about popups, available feeds and so on. I also wish that there was a way to view my Google Reader feeds in the Feed sidebar — you can use the button on the navigation bar to save feeds to Google Reader, but there’s no built-in way to view them.
I’m going to play around a bit more with it, but I suspect that I’ll probably go back to using Safari, Cocoalicious and MarsEdit for posting to my blog.
Blogged with Flock
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My browser of choice now is Omniweb. You do have to pay for it but it's worth it. It's fast, but all browsers are fast nowadays, the limiting factor is the speed of your connection. It renders pages beautifully, and is the only OSX browser that is better looking than Safari. The two particular features I value most are workspaces, which is a bit like Spaces in Leopard, but less faffing about, and the super intelligent auto complete which will offer you for example http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/ if you type "Jobs", "Secret" or any other word from the title of web page "The secret diary of Steve Jobs". Surprisingly useful when you can't quite remember the details of that page you looked at 5 mins ago, but failed to bookmark. Opera does this trick too but it's just too ugly! My second and third choice are Safari and Camino, but 99% of my browsing is with Omniweb.
by ThoughtBadger @ 15/11/2007 11:04 pm • Permalink •
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I think of Flock as a smorgasbord. It has all these features, but you don't have to use them all.
For example, I don't use the blog editor. I find it easier just to go to my blog and post there.
Similarly with the built-in feed reader. I don't bother with it. I just use Google Reader.
The only features I use (over and above the features available in any browser) are the del.icio.us integration, the built-in Flickr uploader, and the search box.
The search box is great. Its functionality is similar to OmniWeb's (according to ThoughtBadger's description)—as you type, it looks for matches in your bookmarks and browser history/cache, as well as the top four results from Yahoo (and others that you can add).
And as for those annoying popups, you can make them disappear and not come back.
by Martin Polley @ 17/11/2007 4:58 am • Permalink •
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ThoughtBadger: I'm quite a fan of OmniWeb too (I registered a copy a while back), and I used it as my main browser for quite a while. However, I found recently that it was crashing quite frequently, and with the improvements in Safari 3, I switched back again. OmniWeb has some superb features, but I wish the stability was a bit better.
Martin Polley: Sure - I can see that. I do like a lot of things about it, but I think I prefer a more stripped-down browser on the whole.
by bsag @ 18/11/2007 6:56 pm • Permalink •
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