22 November 2005

Flock

Flock is the new pre beta web browser that there has been a bit of a buzz about recently, it hopes to reinvent how we use the web by integrating common tools together. I am already thinking that I could get very used to their approach to blogging. Instead of having to go through several screens on blogger you can press a button in the top bar of the browser screen and a window pops up which you can compose and edit from. The link creation is not as easy as it is in blogger but I'm sure they are working on that. The really neat thing is that I can view all the public photos in my flickr stream and drag and drop it into the body of this post so that it can be seen after publishing. There seems to be a lack of formatting tools for the pictures, the spell check doesn't work yet and I can't find how to preview but I'm loving the drag and drop facility so far. But the test is in the posting so here goes.Flickr Photo

4 comments:

  1. Oh help not more technology to master!

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  2. Yeah I came across that today too, I really think they should have gone down the road of extentions for FF rather than a totally new build. They could even have laid out some standards for the different extentions to communicate with each other, so people could write an alternative photo source plug-in that integrates with their blog composer (that pulls them from straight from a digital camera say), or write a content management thing that can use their flickr photo chooser.

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  3. (Caveat: I haven't used Flock, just read the hype.) I don't like the idea of it, mostly as I am an old-style one-tool-does-one-thing unix type. Kids today, don't know they are etcetc. Though I would be interested to hear how it goes.

    jessica: Pulling pics straight from the digital camera, auto-resizing them, and uploading them straight to flickr is very easy. It must be, I wrote a script to do it. Though it is very dependant on my wife's camera, my Powerbook and my flickr account. And is done from the command line.

    I don't get this whole we-must-integrate thing. Why is it good? Surely one (massive) point of failure/dependancy is worse than lots of little ones? Or are we heading back to what was called in the late 90s the application browser? Oh, wait, I forgot, I am out of step with current trends/reality.

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  4. Toater, Me I'm fairly agnostic on the whole intergration thing.

    I'm into IT in that it is a tool for me to do what I want which is mainly sit and play games, write and read blogs etc.

    It if works simply, intuitively and does what I want it to do or gives me something I need I like. It doesn't necessarily have to be integrated I agree just as long as different things work easily together I'm happy.

    I probably won't adopt flock because I am happy with firefox. The drop and drag into a blog post is very nice in flock but it's not exactly a mare to get a photo into a blog entry with blogger. It will take a lot more to make me change web browsers again.

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