i was in san francisco recently for a few days, and the irrepressible will pate told me (shortly after this picture was taken) that i would be impressed with the next release (which was imminent at the time). he was right.

flock's ui feels more polished than i remember from any previous release. sure there are new icons, but thinks seem to be making more sense - falling into place. the del.icio.us integration actually works - and works well (including fixing a long time peeve of mine: the ability to *not* share some bookmarks). probably the most impressive new piece is the vastly improved flickr integration. i think flock's flickr topbar might actually be my favourite way to browse flickr now. and, is it me or does flock actually feel faster than firefox on os x?

i don't use flock's built in news reader, so i can't comment on that... but my one main gripe is still the blog editing tool. it has never supported categories, and seems to no longer even support tags. these are pretty basic features that i use (when i blog). I also no longer see a way to look at & edit old posts. so... it's ecto for me still on that front.

but if you're one of the web two point oh crowd (or wanna be) and use flickr, del.icio.us, etc... well you might wanna give this latest release a shot.

(oh, and yeah they relaunched their site using drupal, naturally)

cross-platform blogging / etc here i come.!

fast forward a couple months (and a couple conferences) and low and behold, flock is starting to come together. to be honest, I've been quiet about my reservations because i happen to know and really respect a couple of flockers. so, i have faith that flock one day will totally rock. and given my current forced cross-platform-ness, the idea of a blogging app in my browser is much more appealing.

another really nice thing (from my point of view) is they've done an excellent job of ensuring that the popular (and as far as i'm concerned essential) firefox extensions all work with flock.

but i've still got a beef. like i said i had a long post. problem is, the blogging tool in flock isn't quite there yet. it's a minor bug - but one that makes posting from flock to drupal impossible. so, after a few minutes of debugging, i managed to at least come up with a bug report. looks like someone from blojsom noticed too.

anyway guys, keep up the good work... and if you ever have questions about ensuring harmony between drupal and flock - you know where to find me :)

OH - speaking of flock. so here's an off the wall rumour that is based on absolutely no real information. but it's no mistake that Y! (not google) is the default search engine for flock. factor in the out-of-the-box flickr integration, mix in constant rumours of the "google browser" and ... well... are we looking at a future Y! acquisition? who knows perhaps throw in some lightning and upcoming.org integration and away you go.

then, once we become BrY!ght - we'll all be co-workers.

er. i'll stop now ;)