Flock, the new browser on the block

For a few weeks now I am using Flock, a new browser that integrates posting features to sites like deli.cio.us (this includes tagging capabilities), flickr, and the ability to create blog posts to one's very own blogs within the interface of the browser. Most likely many of you have heard of it already. Flock seems lighter and thus faster than Firefox. Flock has 13 key features.

1. The Star button (Out with bookmarks, in with Flock Favorites.)
They're stored online, and they're shared, searchable, and tagged. Simply click the Star in the URL bar and you've flagged a page. You can easily retrieve it later. The Star turns orange (and is orange the next time you visit the page, to remind you that this is one of your favorites).

2. Tagging. You can add tags to Favorites by simply clicking the little arrow next to the Star icon. Or, if you like to tag, Open the Flock menu, choose Preferences, and go to the Web Services section. Activate the "Clicking Star Performs Star and Tag" option. You can also bring up the tagging dialog by clicking CTRL-D (Windows).

3. Favorites Manager. The Favorites Manager is a simple way to organize and view your Favorites and a feed reader (see below).
4. History Search. Flock comes with the open source Clucene search engine built in. Each time you visit a web page, it indexes all the content on that page so you can easily retrace your steps later. Pages you've starred as Favorites float to the top when you do a History Search. History Search is stored locally for privacy. For more privacy, you can wipe it out using the Clear Private Data command.
5. Most Frequently Visited / Most Recently Added. Flock keeps track of which web pages you visit most frequently.
6. Multiple favorites toolbars. With Flock, you can have multiple Favorites toolbars and switch back and forth between them.

Feeds
7. Feed discovery. Just like Firefox, Flock puts an icon in the URL bar when a site has one or more feeds. In Flock, you can click that icon to get an feed view of the page.
8. Feed caching. When you star a web page that has a feed, the feed is cached and updated every hour.
9. On the Fly Aggregation. Flock automatically creates an aggregated view for all of your collections. If you create a collection of news sites that you visit every day, you can see an aggregated view of all your news site on one page.

Blogging
10. With Flock, blogging is a fully integrated part of the Web. Flock includes a blog editor that works with WordPress (and the new Wordpress.com hosted service), Movable Type and Typepad (and shortly also Live Journal) and Blogger. Other blogging platforms have not been tested.
11. Blog This! You can easily blog interesting web content with Flock, in just a few clicks.
12. Flickr topbar. With Flock, blogging Flickr pictures is easy. You can drag and drop pictures from our integrated Flickr topbar right into your blog post.
13. The Shelf. The Shelf is a scrapbook for interesting web content that you want to blog about later.

 

Update on November 11, 2005 at 22:43 by [Trebor]

Smultron (simple, nice text/code editor)
http://smultron.sourceforge.net/

Jedit (much appreciated programmer's text editor)
http://www.jedit.org/

Vienna (RSS Reader)
http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna_files.html
 
Processing (Programming for the Arts)
http://processing.org/download/index.html

Audacity (Sound)
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Audacity_for_Mac_OS_X/1023856334/2

XAMPP
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

CC Mixter (collab sound design)
http://ccmixter.org/