A Single Article

Running on Flock Developer Preview

Yes, it’s true. I got an e-mail from Flock telling me that I could download the Flock Developer Preview. It’s apparently somewhere between alpha and beta, not ready for the typical end-user, and way more buggy than a beta.

I’m not sure what to think. The browser itself is a lot like Firefox, and then that’s where it’s no longer the same. Apparently Flock is designed to be an interface for lots of popular web applications, like blogs, Del.icio.us, and Flickr. I don’t use Del.icio.us or Flickr, but I definitely blog, and if you haven’t realized it already, I’m writing this blog post through Flock. I haven’t logged in to my online blog manager like I usually do, I just connected to my blog through the Flock blog interface. Think of it as using an offline client to update your Livejournal.

One concern is that this beta has a ways to go… I don’t have categories, special fields, etc. I can’t access the Wordpress dashboard, just post. And who knows what category this post will go to. I’ll have to go find out when I am done. This interface does have it’s benefits, though… if I see something I like on the web, I can just launch this and blog it, without having to go through the usual visit - login - dashboard process. I don’t know if I’ll be such an impulse blogger, though… but if this supports all the features of my dashboard in the final version, it might work.

I’ll have more to share on this preview of Flock as time passes. Maybe some screenshots too.

[edit]: ok, this isn’t going to work. Sure enough, I did have to edit this entry. Flock comes with a Technoratic Tagging field, but it’s not the one setup with my Wordpress plugin, rather a Flock style tagging setup, which is less desirable. And this post did end up in the default category, and I had to move it to “Technology.” I’ll have to tell the developers to make the blogging interface more advanced, or set up a way for me to configure it. Until then, it’s not gonna work.