Vagabond’s Caravan

I accidentally stumble across this cool browser called Flock weeks ago, downloaded it but never really tried it much. And when I look at my desktop(cleaned out all unused shortcuts and files), I saw it there, and decided to give it a real try. =)

It turns out to be a great experience surfing using Flock, especially if you’re a heavy user of various online social activities like Flickr(photosharing), blogging(almost all blogging platform are supported), reading news and blogs(I’ll introduce RSS to you guys later, and how it works with Flock and other tools) and etc.

Like the tagline(sort of like a motto, secondary title) says, Flock is build to be a social web browser, which focus on the several things mentioned above. Flock is actually a browser developed out of Firefox, it’s sort of like a Firefox tailored for socializing online, LoL.

Flock allow a smooth integration of Flickr and Photobucket into it, which allow you to easily browse yours or others photostream while surfing. You can also easily drag thumbnails of photo from the photostream into your typing area so you can share it with people.

What’s even cooler about Flock is that there’s a built-in text editor which allow you to blog directly from your browser, instead of signing in to your Blogger account, wait for it to load, start typing, publish and etc. With Flock, blogging is just 2 steps away. =)

My favourite feature of Flock would be the Snippets tool. It’s a small bar at the bottom of your Flock, which you can choose to how and hide it freely. With the snippets tool, you can drag codes, texts or even photos to it, and save it for later use. It’s like the usual “copy ‘n’ paste” we have been for years, but it allows you to copy more than one time, and you can see them in graphical use. It’s especially handy for bloggers who often need to drag images from various sites, copy text and excerpts from various sources and etc.

No more time consuming copy ‘n’ paste! Use Flock for fast and easy snippets creation!=) For your information, Snippets means small excerpts of notes or codes, it’s sort of like notes. =)

Flock also offers a great RSS news reader which allow you to easily add RSS into your Flock, and view them easily. RSS means Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a very important feature online today. Blogs grew rapidly nowadays, and web contents are being updated very often. So, it’s not really possible for you to visit all the sites you like and check if they’re updating it everyday right? Use RSS then. =)

RSS is a kind of technology which ‘feed’(means fetch) the updating contents from certain website, and deliver it to you. With RSS, you’ll be ‘feed’, it’s like we’re looking for ‘food’(as in news and blog posts) before, and now we’re kids and being ‘feed’ by ‘adults’(RSS!). I used to have a nice RSS tool on my Firefox, which allow me to keep track of all my friends’ blogs, but it’s not as smooth as what I found on Flock.

Read more about RSS here, a post I wrote before about RSS, CSS and AJAX. =)

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Click on the thumbnail below to view it’s full size, which is a Flock screenshot I created, will ugly lines all over it, haha.Legends:

• green line - Flickr Photostream browsing on Flock
• red line - Snippets bar showing snippets of photos(the codes actually, so you can just drag it into your blog posts) and texts(coppied from Lipiang ’s blog).
• blue line - The RSS nwes reader. The sidebar shows the various news you already added into your ‘menu’, and click on the will show you the contents on the left. You can customize it to fit your need. I am looking at RSS of blog posts excerpts from Lipiang blog.
• yellow line - Built-in text editor which allow you to publish your blog posts to your blog instantly.
• purple line - Handy buttons which allow you to easily show and hide the various features as explained above.

I hope you’ll like Flock! =)

Rating : 4.8/5(It’s being developed out of Firefox, so it won’t be suprising that it’s real good).

P.S: My Firefox keeps on clashing these weeks, and I guess it’s due to the massive number of extensions I installed last time, haha. Some of them doesn’t work that well, you know. =) So I guess I’ll be using Flock into the arrival of Firefox 2.0! =)