notthatwillsmith

I’ve spent the last few days either working feverishly on our Holiday issue or enjoying the media circus that Apple manages to attract at every launch event. While I enjoyed seeing rev5.1 iPods and am moderately interested in the new Nano, I still don’t understand why the mainstream and tech media shows up in such force to the Apple events.

Anyway, I wanted to talk a second about Flock. We don’t normally review free software in the pages of Maximum PC, since it’s easy enough for you to download and try out yourself. However, a few weeks ago, while waiting for Firefox 2, I decided to give Flock a try.

The main selling point for me was Flock’s del.icio.us integration. Many years ago, I gave up on using bookmarks in my browser. With the number of bookmarks that I accumulate, the long list of unsorted links that most browsers use is virtually unusable. Flock uses the links in your del.icio.us repository as its bookmarks. You can organize and search them using tags, share them with all of your other computers (or the rest of the world). It’s very nice, and makes large collections of bookmarks actually usable. It would be hard for me to go back to Firefox now that I’ve used Flock’s bookmarks–hopefully the Firefox team will roll the del.icio.us functionality into the main Firefox codepath.

Other notable feature include photo sharing site integration and the blog posting tool, which I’m using right now. The blog poster is rudimentary, but perfectly acceptable for quick’n'dirty posts. It certainly won’t replace Ecto or w.blogger, but it’s OK.

Photo integration–at least for Flickr users–kicks ass too. Flock includes a simple uploader and a photo bar at the top of the browser window. In the bar, you can see all your Flickr photos. If you want to link to one in a message board or blog post, just drag the image to the text box. It couldn’t be much more quick and convenient.

The Flock experience still isn’t perfect. Extension support is still fairly limited. The key extensions–greasemonkey, mouse gestures, and gmail notifier–are there, but if you use some of the more esoteric add-ons, you may be out of luck. I still miss the TinyURL creator every day.

If you want to give Flock a try, give it a download!