I posten om Opera (som forøvrig slapp versjon 9-preview i dag) nevnte jeg Flock, en Firefox-basert “sosial” nettleser det knyttes store forventinger til. I dag har Flock gitt ut en såkalt Developer Preview, og det var ikke helt uten skjelvende neve og slevende kjeve jeg lastet ned, installerte og gikk igang med å teste dette nettets potensielle syvende underverk. Og resultatet? Mer eller mindre som forventet: Flott design, god integrasjon med diverse webtjenester, men ikke helt der ennå.

Andre nordboere som skriver om Flock:

• Andedammen
• k-märkt
• Webaksess
• Jill Walker
• Eirik Stavelin

De følgende forslag til forbedringer av Flock, vekker nok liten interesse i min leserkrets, men så er de er da heller ikke ment på denne akk så eksklusive forsamling. Grunnen til at jeg legger det ut her midlertidig er at confirmation-mailen fra Flock-forumet de er ment på har hatt problemer med å komme gjennom UiB sitt strenge spamfilter.

What follows are suggestions for improvement of the (very promising) Flock browser.

The shelf

Support drag and drop from localhost

I want to be able to drag and drop pictures from my own computer onto the shelf – these are, after all the ones I’m most likely to blog. Let the user specify a Flickr account or a webserver for the images to reside on.

Keeping style and structure apart

There’s no way Flock could guess what the classes in people’s stylesheet mean – so let us tell it. Flock-blogging leads to content being styled the old ugly HTML-way. A workaround for this could be letting Flock know what tags should mean what. For example, I want to tell Flock to use <em>instead of < i>, and I want to tell it that I want all images should be attributed with class=”blogpostimage”.

One top menu (or sidebar) to rule them all

The “Flickr Photos” and “Blog topbar” shouldn’t be hidden behind a cascading menu. And why can’t I see both simultanously? Rework the topbar so that it becomes more like the side panels in Opera – powerful, well-arranged and easily available. Let the user choose where he wants to position this side/top bar. This bar could also house feeds, history and “social data”. And of course, the aforementioned shelf should sit here.

Del.icio.us integration

A superior solution? Include a tag entry window in the browser itself. Being able to type in tags and just press enter (or the star button) would lower the threshold for tagging a lot. There should be two other fields available: One for suggested tags (based on the cross between your existing tagspace and other users tags for this page) and one for other people’s tags. This would make Flock into a true tagging killer app.

Flock as a social browser

I want to see what others have said about the page I am visiting. I want to be able to see (in a sidebar or in a top menu) not only what others have tagged ths page, but also what people have said about the page. Yes I know Technorati is slow – hopefully better solutions will come along (do you hear me Google?). This would ensure a different and more social browsing experience.

This was supposed to be the network age, right?

OK, so the two last suggestions doesn’t have much to do with the current Flock itself, but it’s functionality I want to see in such an ambitious browser. With the del.icio.us integration, my bookmarks stay the same whereever I go. Great! But I need for more than just my bookmarks to be synchronised. I want a central server to keep track of my open windows and browser settings (not in realtime, but let’s say every hour or every time I close the browser). This way I could use different computers and still focus on what’s relevant: The browsing is. Not having to fumble with different settings and having to remember what computer I was seated at when I browsed this-or-that page. It doesn’t make sense to have different setups -unless one wants to, that is.

But what if one wants to?

Some people might like to keep one set of windows for work, one for play, and so on. Let me be able to drag and drop windows into groups, so I can separate the mind spheres more easily. My mind is a mess – so is the internet – help me organise.

Innlegget ble postet 22 oktober, 2005 klokken 00:44 og har følgende nøkkelord: brukergrensesnitt, flock, nettlesere, tagging. Følg eventuell respons ved hjelp av innleggets RSS 2.0-feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.