I hate to say that Flock is “a browser”. It’s true that you can surf the web with it and leave the rest of Flock’s features untouched. But I think of Flock as more of a tool to exploit the web; to integrate more of my life and my day’s work with the web. In a nutshell, Flock uses web-based sites and technologies to take the place of things that a normal browser either does poorly, or just doesn’t do.
Instead of a bookmark file or favorites list, Flock uses your del.icio.us account to manage your favorites, which just makes so much sense to me. Why should I ever wonder where I bookmarked something? I see a site I want to bookmark, I “star” it in Flock. Flock will let me tag it if I want, and then it’ll post it to my del.icio.us account. The beauty here is that now my bookmarks are automatically synced across all of the machine where I use Flock… which is to say, all of my machines. Nice.
Blogging to a blogger, wordpress, or movabletype blog can be done directly from Flock. I’m writing this entry using Flock’s editor. When I hit ‘publish’, it’ll ask me which blog to publish to (I have more than one), and that’s that. Unfortuately, I haven’t found a way to automagically publish a single entry to more than one blog. This isn’t usually necessary, but can occasionally be useful. The benefit to me here is that I don’t have to go to a site, log in, start an entry, and then wonder if my session timed out when I get called away for an hour.
Flock also supports “drag ‘n’ drop” photo publishing to your Flickr account, has a news feed manager, and other stuff I haven’t even tried to use yet. Given all of these features, probably the most surprising thing about Flock is how easy, intuitive, and accessible they’ve been able to make all of these features while still hanging onto a very clean interface.
Flock does all of this by managing connections to all of the web services involved. Flock’s configuration enables you to enter your account information, and tell flock how you want to handle things. You can either be prompted for a password each time, or have Flock store your account information, and it’ll log on automatically. You can also optionally set up a master password to protect all of the information Flock stores.
Flock is currently in beta, but has become many times more stable since it’s initial release. I’ve thoroughly tested every feature with the exception of photo management, and I’m finding it to be a real pleasure to use this time ’round.
Blogged with Flock