I revisited the Flock web browser on the occasion of it’s recent full 1.0 release. I’ll admit that at first glance, I didn’t see the need for it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess around to see if it would function with all of my crucial Firefox add-ons.

But today there was a bit of excitement in front of my apartment: a car burst into flames. After calling 911, I grabbed my camera and went down to document things. As I prepared to upload the movie and photos, I remembered that one of Flock’s features is easy uploading to both Flickr and YouTube. I had already started uploading the video using Firefox, but I opened Flock and pretty easily found the mechanism for uploading photos, and found it satisfyingly simple.

Then I was browsing Flickr using it, and I begin to see more of the smooth integration. Look at the top of the Flickr photo in this screenshot:

It looks very natural, but that black bar with the blobby icons is added by Flock when you mouseover the image. The blog button opens a new post in Flock’s built-in blog editor, with the image already inlined, including the link back to the original Flickr page as specified by the Flickr Community Guidelines. I used the tool for some (but not all) of the drafting of this post. The E-mail button opens a mailto link, which brings up a message in your default email application with the subject and body text already filled in — but the mailto URL scheme couldn’t realistically support passing an email body which already included the image.

“View Stream” refers to one of Flock’s innovative (for a web browser) application concepts. Choosing to view the stream opens a sidebar in the browser showing thumbnails of photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr. The stream not only shows thumbnails, but it offers alternative means of accessing the aforementioned blog and e-mail functionality. It also (as seen in the open menu in this screenshot) gives you a shortcut to the rather long chunk of HTML (or BBCode for use in phpBB and similar forums) needed to share the picture in a post (again, adhering to the Flickr community guidelines and linking back to the page).

The blog editor is serviceable, but a bit incomplete. The “link text” button offers the href, but not the “title” attribute, and I tend to be a little fastidious about including titles on my links. Also, it provides no mechanism for uploading images like the screenshots in this post, unless I suppose I were to upload those to Flickr, which isn’t my preference. I switched to the WordPress editor to handle those, and to see how Flock dealt with posting incomplete posts.

It actually doesn’t have the concept of sending a draft post to your blog, although that may just be a shortcoming of the Movable Type posting API which Flock (automatically) determined could be used to post to my blog. This is not necessarily a big deal, since Flock itself allows you to save posts. I’m not sure that I’ll use the Flock editor frequently, because I’m actually pretty fond of the WordPress editor. It’s a sign of the times that the WP editor is implemented using Javascript and HTML and can still outperform the functionality in a native application. The Flock editor does support the ATOM publishing protocol, which I believe is considerably more featureful than the MT API; I’ll try that later.

It does not seem to support retrieving existing posts from the blog, a feature I appreciated when I used Kung-Log to post to my Movable Type blog. I would have liked to use that to add the inlined video I shot of the fire, especially because I often wrestle with getting the Flash embed to work when trying to add it in the WordPress editor (one small shortcoming despite the praise above). No matter, since the dang video hasn’t finished uploading yet, so I’ll come back and use Flock to add it later.

I have to admit that just the way Flock seems to be smart about Flickr is worthy of praise; however, as I was looking around I got the sense that it has considerably more promise. But I’m going to save thinking about that for a future blog post.