Thursday, 8. May 2008, 05:48:17
computers, flock
One of the internet browsers with the most potential that I've yet to see is Flock
Yet it just consistently disappoints me. Something comes up and I think "I'll give flock a go on that", and I try it and find it just doesn't quite get there.
It's great on news feeds (RSS). But oh so slow. I have about 120 feeds that i subscribe to and opera gets through them all in less than a minute. Flock displays them really nicely but it's as slow as a wet week!
Flock has great connections with social networking sites. As I've just started with facebook I thought I'd try that. It will let me log into facebook on a normal page but the actual widget that puts all your friends on the sidebar won't log in.
Very frustrating.
So I'm still finding Opera is faster and more reliable than any other browser out there. It would be nice to have a facebook panel though!
Wednesday, 25. July 2007, 23:59:11
computers, opera, flock, browser
After a couple of weeks of testing the Flock browser I'm returning to opera for the time being.
Flock is brilliant at what it does- combining a great browser with some excellent social tools such as newsreader, blog authoring, video and photo uploading- all in a nice looking package. What I really like is the web clipboard which allows you to just select text, images etc and drag them on to a clip board area for later pasting into a blog post.
But for some reason the blog tool gets stuck when I try to publish stuff to this blog. It takes a good 5 minutes to download the list of tags from the my.opera server. There seems to be no way around it, so I've decided to come back to using opera which has been my preferred browser for years-- going back to about version 3 I think.
Flock is still at version 0.9. Their team are trying to iron out the bugs before releasing 1.0.
In the meantime I'm using opera. I've also found a nifty widget which is almost as good as the flock blog tool. It lets you copy text, links etc into a small window which you can then upload directly to a my.opera blog. It's not as nifty as the Flock set up, but it's not bad. And it works!
Wednesday, 11. July 2007, 07:49:05
computers, flock
I've been using flock as my browser for a while now. I have just downloaded the latest version (0.9) and it takes what was a good product into something really amazing.What I like about it is that it integrates blogging and news reading into the browser. That means you can quickly select text, pictures and whatever from a web site and put it together into a blog post.I also like the way that flock handles news feeds which is miles ahead of opera's in my opinion.Flock also integrates photo sharing through flickr and video sharing in YouTube.Being based on the Mozilla engine means that it is standards compliant and reliable in its handling of web pages. It can also use firefox extensions and plug ins.I was also impressed with the ease with which it automated the transfer of my settings from the previous version of flock. The only downside in this was that one of my extensions that I had installed was incompatible with the new version.Anyway I'm very happy with flock and I recommend you have a look at it. www.flock.comBlessingsKeithBlogged with Flock
Friday, 30. March 2007, 08:01:27
opera, computers, browsers, flock
After several months of playing with the Flock Browser, I've come back to Opera (using 9.2 Beta in linux).
What I like about Flock:
- It has a built in blog editor, which is quite nice, although lacking a couple of features that I would find useful.
- You can just highlight text, click "blog this" and it publishes it to your blog
- Newsfeeds are handled quite well, with a nice graphical display.
- An icon on the tool bar gets a big orange spot when newsfeeds have been downloaded.
- The "web snippets" bar which allows you to drag and drop interesting bits from the web for later including in your blog
- Highlighting text and graphics, includes graphics and not just text when you copy and paste
What I don't like about flock
- It takes "forever" to render the newsfeed pages... the format is nice, but it takes too long to get to the place where you can read your stuff
- The categories in the blog tool don't translate to tags in Opera blogs
- The search bar operates differently from Opera's-- it's good, but Opera is more flexible.
- Often formatting, including paragraphs, is lost when copying to the blog tool
So I'm back to Opera. Overall I think it leads by a tad.
For Opera to become really excellent I would like the following small features:
- Some visual indicator that you have unread newsfeeds
- The ability to cut and paste graphics along with text.
- I thnk the web snippets bar is a good thing also- there's probably a widget that does the same thing
WIDGETIZE