Latest release at time of writing: Flock 1.7.4.1

Not many of you will have previously heard of the new browser "Flock". It's based on the latest Mozilla Firefox code (so it has the same security updates etc, can potentially utilise the same extensions and feels the same as the 'fox), but it's not a rip of the code. If you havn't tried Flock, I recommend you do so. You can download the latest release here.

Alternatively you can download the latest nightly build (they do a new build every few hours, without any really noticeable implementations, just code changes and bug fixes) here

So what's so great about Flock? We all know Firefox is a great browser and certainly revolutionised the web, what's Flock got to offer that Firefox hasn't? Sam told me that he wouldn't even consider downloading Flock because Firefox does everything he wants from his browser, that is, store his favourites, and he wasn't interested in anything new unless it could give him a blow job. Admittedly, Flock can not give you a blow job. But don't let that put you off, Flock has many great features that Firefox doesn't incorporate, and hopefully this post will open your mind a bit and encourage you to give Flock a chance. I know it's not for everyone because it offers stuff that some people don't need, however, it's known as the "Social Browser", so if you use the internet, the chances are Flock has something to offer you.

When you first start Flock you get what looks like Firefox with a fancy new skin and search box, and a couple of extra buttons on the toolbar. These are the photo and news buttons. I recommend that you customise the toolbars to add "Favourites" on there as well, for easy access. As of yet they havn't added favourites to the sidebar (something which is awesome with the All-In-One Sidebar extension). So let's explore these new items.

Photo Sharing
More and more people are taking photographs these days, and keeping track of them all can be a real hassle. If you have a Photobucket or Flickr account, or even if you don't, the Photobar is some great work. If you have one of these accounts you can upload your photos through Flock using the uploader. The uploader lets you edit the filename, description and size, chose the folder and crop or rotate any image from your PC or the web, just drag and drop it into the uploader or chose it through the file browser. The photos you set as public will then be shared with the world.

It should be noted that Flock in the future will be providing more photo services, and infact they will have an open API so that virtually any provider can interact with Flock's photobar.

To view someone else's photos you don't even need a Flickr or Photobucket account. You can either search for a username by clicking on "View Another Person", or if when you however over a photograph you see this symbol in the bottom left corner: it means that photo is hosted on either Flickr or Photobucket, and you can hover this to show:
(Alternatively the button will show up in the right side of the Location Bar)
Once clicked it will bring up that person's Photostreem in the Photobar for your browsing pleasure. You can then add them as a favourite by clicking the star which you can see at the top left of the photobar. This will add them under your "Photo Favourites" list, and you will be notified when they add more pictures, another section will appear saying "New". In addition the photobar button on the main toolbar will display an orange coloured circle on it to tell you that there is unviewed content. This is the same for the News Reader.

Feed Reading
Flock can automatically import your live bookmarks (and all your bookmarks) from Firefox if you chose, so don't worry about that being an inconvenience; it really isn't. The news button on the toolbar will have an orange circle on it if you have unread items.

You can easily add new feeds by clicking on the button which appears in the location bar when a feed is available. This is perhaps best shown by the news reader tour on the Flock website. Flock comes ready with a bunch of feeds already installed which can be kept or easily deleted depending on your personal preference. It's safe to say that this certainly works better than Firefox's method, and if Live Bookmarks are important to you in Firefox, the Feed Reader in Flock will seem like heaven to you.

Favourites Toolbar
The favourites toolbar is displayed, like in Firefox, below the location bar. However, Flock's version is a little different. As you can group your favourites into categories, the favourites toolbar lets you select which category of favourites to currently display on the bar. This is done using a little drop down feature, as you can see from the following pictures - click on them to enlarge them.

Here you can see that the collection "Favourites Toolbar" is selected.

When the arrows are clicked it brings up a drop-down screen. This shows all the collections that are in place in the favourites manager, which we will get to soon. As you can see there is a "From Firefox" collection, which is all my bookmarks imported from Firefox. You can create any number of collections and switch between them easily on the Favourites Toolbar. In this case I will chose Firefox and Mozilla Links to switch to.

And as you can see, Firefox and Mozilla Links is now displayed on the favourites toolbar.

This means that the favourites toolbar no longer has limited space, you can have as many bookmarks as you want on there, just a click away!

Favourites
Favourites has been vastly improved in Flock, and there are many, many new features. Along with the favourites toolbar in the Favourites Manager. This is easily reached if you place the "Favourites" button on the toolbar, or you can go through Favourites > Manage Your Favourites

With Flock you don't really need to organise your favourites unless you use a lot of organised collections to display on the Favourites Toolbar. This means that you can favourite anything you like. How do you favourite? It's so simple, you just click on the blue star at the start of the location bar, it changes to orange, it's now a favourite. If you double click the star you can save and tag the page. Tagging allows for a more powerful search. For example, you could run through a bunch of pages and tag them "Unread" along with whatever else you want to tag it with. Then you can use the search function in the Favourites Manager and search "Unread" to bring up all the pages that you tagged with that - then you can read a page, double click on the star when you have finished and change the tag from "Unread" to "Viewed" or something similar. You also have the option to add a description for the page, and share it if you wish.

Flock currently offers favourites sharing services such as Del.icio.us and Shadows, so you can see how many other people like the stuff you like, or something, I don't really get the point to these favourites sharing accounts but I have one none-the-less. If you don't want to share your favourites with everyone you can just store them locally, as with Firefox, or you can chose "Share with my other Computers", to share with other PCs that you use when you have Flock and these services enabled - it will download them onto the new PC for you, so you don't have to worry about exporting and importing anything.

When you star a page it adds it to the favourites library. The library holds all your bookmarks, and each bookmark can be optionally placed in a collection, or two, or three, or however many you like. If you click on a collection it brings up only those bookmarks in that collections, it's a bit like a search. These are the same collections that act on the Favourites Toolbar.
To add a collection it's a breeze. Simply click "Add Collection" in the bottom left of the browser, and enter a name for it, then you can drag and drop bookmarks into that collection, or Star and Tag them - remember you can chose to add as many collections as you like, and add any bookmark into any number of collections.

The favourites manager incorporates a search, found at the bottom of the manager in the centre. This search is much like any other library search - you have the full library, you type in a keyword, or keywords, hit enter, and the appropriate items from that library are then shown. Perfect. No need to categorise everything into folders - tags do the work for you.

Another option which I recently discovered when playing with Flock is hitting Ctrl + i. This is probably experimental, and brings up "Bookmarks" in the sidebar (not sure if this is true if you do not have the All-In-One Sidebar extension). Right click on a bookmark (or create one if you do not have any there) and select properties. You'll see options for "name", "location", "keyword", "gestures", and description", and an option to "load this bookmark in the sidebar". Now you may be wondering why this is there - if you go to a search engine, e.g. www.google.co.uk, and right click in the Search Box, you'll see a drop down list. In this drop down list there is an option to "Add a keyword for this search". If you do this, you can add a keyword such as "Google", and then when you type "Google This is a search" into the location bar you will come up with this result. Pretty cool. I know there was this keyword in Firefox, that's why I was trying to get it in Flock, because I use it a lot. However, the way they've implemented it means that you can go to any search engine, and add any keyword, e.g. "gimage plants" would take me to Google Image, searching for "plants".
Heck, it doesn't even have to be a search engine. I use Quintessential Media Player and seeing as I use the forums a lot, I added a bookmark for the forums in this "Bookmarks" section. Under the properties section I added the keyword "qmp" and directed the bookmark at the forums main page. When I type "qmp" in the location bar it goes straight to the forums. There's also the option of adding mouse gestures. I added the gesture 'Left Right Left' to open the qmp forums. You can chose new or same tab or window. This feature used to be pretty buggy, with the gestures being removed on browser restart, but that problem seems to be fixed in the latest releases. There's no telling how much time this feature could save people.

Search
You've already seen the Favourites Manager search function; now meet the "Web Search" function. Don't let the name fool you, it's much more than a websearch. So much so that it could even make your favourites manager search redundent depending on your browser usage. To best show you how it works, I did an example search for the term "Google". As you can see, when the pointer is placed in the search page the Magnifying Glass icon changes to the Google Icon - that is because Google is my default search engine. You can change this setting by going to "Search Preferences".

As you can see, the search doesn't just search the web. If you want to do that, you can simply hit "enter" after typing your keyword and it acts the same way as the Firefox search. But there's more, if you want it. As you type the window you can see here pops up, displaying Local Favourites, Local History, and other sites to search. I typed "Google", so Flock searched my favourites for all the sites I have that contai the word "Google", either in description, tag, url, or name. It also did the same for my history, searching the name and url of every page I've visited that's stored. Flock only shows the first 4 options from each one, but there's an option to "View All", if you so wish. The fact that "Google Mail - Inbox" is displayed twice isn't a bug; I do actually have two different bookmarks called that.
The search elsewhere function will search whatever you click on. You can chose which search engines to display under the "Search Elsewhere" heading by going to the Search Preferences. You can add any of these search engines; they'll probably add more in the future, but I think you'll agree...that's more than enough! To keep the list clutter-free you can chose how many, and which ones to display on the list, from one to all of them. They're displayed in alphabetical order, as you can see.

Blogging
What an idea! Blogging from the browser with such ease. Flock currently supports blogs hosted by WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal and Blogger, whilst also supporting blogs that use the APIs Movable Type, MetaWeblog, Blogger and Atom. It's a breeze to set up - all you have to do is go to "Accounts and Settings" and follow the instrcutions. Alternatively I believe you can go to your blog, log in, and Flock will realise that you can add this as a Blogging Account and ask you if you want to. It's just too easy to blog with Flock. There's a standard editor and a source editor, so whichever way you like to do things, you can. You can easily switch between them using the tabs at the bottom of the editing window. When you're finished simply hit "Publish", chose the blog to publish too, select "New Post" or "Replace Existing Post", add tags if you so wish in the Tags box, select whether you wish to visit the blog after posting and whether you want to add "Blogged With Flock" to the bottom of your post (see mine), and hit Publish again .. bingo, you're done. The spell check option has the American dictionary set as default, but it's quick and painless to download your preferred dictionary - just chose "Download More". You'll be taken here and you can chose any of the dictionaries listed to install.

As you can see there is "The Shelf", a sort of snippets bar (more about this further down) available in the blog editor. This means that dragging and dropping anything you previously saved for blogging about later is quick and easy. The photobar can not be displayed, but you can bring up the photobar in the main browser window and drag and drop from there if you wish. You can also drag and drop images from webpages.

The blog editor stays "Always On Top". Hopefully this will be optional in future releases because it does bug me a bit when I want to go back to the webpage behind what I'm typing - I can't click on the page in the background, I have to minimise the blog first.

There's also a notification options. It comes ready with Technorati.com, but you can add other services and chose whether or not to "Always notify web services of my new posts". In addition you can add tags, which display as you can see at the bottom of this post. It's easy to add tags as you can see from the screenshot.

The Shelf
The Shelf is another great feature from Flock that goes very well with the Blog Editor as mentioned earlier. Don't ask me why it's called "The Shelf" because I don't know, but it's probably something to do with it holding stuff that you can easily view, put on and take off. Just click the button that looks somewhat like an envelope but could be a clipboard: , and the shelf opens up. You can drag and drop text or images to it, or create your own snippets by pressing, suprise suprise, "Create Snippets". As you can see in the image, it's really, really simple. It's great for blogging because, for example, if you see an image you want to use later in your blog post, you can drag and drop it to the shelf for later use. Similarly, if you see an article with something interesting written in it, you can select the text, and drag and drop that to the shelf as well!

That was going to be it for this post, but then...

Whilst writing this blog I discovered yet another feature. If you have an image in your clipboard, for example if you take a screen shot, and you are using the blog editor, you can press Ctrl + V (insert) and it will bring up the "Quick Uploader" for you to upload the image to your account. Once done it adds the code to your blog. It's like they've literally thought of every little detail.

So there you have it, Flock is certainly a great browser, perfect for Web 2.0. It's got so many features to offer almost anyone, old or young, whether you want to keep up with your friends' photos or share your own, blog easily or keep better track of your news and favourites .. almost anything is possible with Flock. Despite it being in beta stage, I still recommend you try it out, it's pretty stable. You might wanted to consider getting this extension first - Session Manager - it will restore your crashed sessions were Flock to crash .. remember, it's not quite perfect yet, it is still a beta .. but it's pretty damn close.

technorati tags:Flock, Firefox, Change, Favourites, Search, Blogging, Toolbar, Shelf, Snippets, Tags, Browsers, Web, 2.0

Blogged with Flock