I got an invite today for Flock. I thought I was special, but I know I see on slashdot that anyone can download it. Either way, I thought I try it out and see what all the hoopla is about.
It turns out that it is pretty cool especially if you are into blogging and feeds.
Since its based off of the Mozilla code, it might look familiar. Looking at the buttons, it seems to already come with a theme. One of Flock’s big features is that it can save the bookmarks in a del.icio.us account by clicking on the star by the URL. The first time you try to bookmark it, a pop-up asks for the del.icio.us username and password.
In the Options menus, there is a choice to tag a page when bookmarked. After that, every time a site is bookmarked, a pop-up allows multiple tags to be entered.
Next up, blogging. There is a feather icon on the toolbar. Clicking it the first time displays a pop-up for setting up the blog. Then another window pop-ups letting you post.
Flock has something called the Shelf (its on the upper left hand in the next screenshot). URLs and images can dragged and dropped into it. Its kind of a notepad of things that need to be blogged about. From the Shelf, the objects can be dragged into the blog window. Text stored in the Shelf gets blockquotes and images are hyperlinked in the blogs. The images show up directly in the blog window, but they are still hyperlinked in the blog as an image source. It can’t upload any images.
There are a couple of interesting things to notice. There is a topbar icon that allows you to display flickr images or previous posts in the blog. Previous posts can be edited and either saved as drafts or published. Like most blog editors, publishing is quick.
Here is how a post created in Flock looks in a WordPress preview:
A really hand feature is that the Shelf remembers its contents, so its possible to come back to it after restarting Flock.
I’ll add screenshots of RSS integration later.