Download Flock 0.5.13

Flock is a browser that Make use of of Mozilla Firefox and wants to distinguish itself from other browsers by the social aspect that this browser brings. It comes standard with various options for the user to interact with the internet. These social capabilities include bookmark storage and publishing via the popular del.icio.us web service, photo storage via the Flickr website, automatic registration and organization of RSS feeds, and direct support for authoring posts for weblogs. The developers recently released a new version with 0.5.13 as the version number. The announcement looks like this:

Welcome to the 0.5.13 release of Flock. If you’ve made it this far, chances are you’re aware of the risks associated with software that’s somewhere between alpha and beta.

While we are very excited about what we are doing, we want to make sure that you are fully forewarned that this browser may crash from time to time and that any settings you save in this browser may be erased, lost, or overwritten. Please have a backup of your blog posts and your shared bookmarks. So we strongly recommend that you proceed with caution.

Still here? Great!

Please read these release notes. We’ve formatted them beautifully for you. They give you information you need to know.

New Online Favorites Service
Flock 0.5.13 has support for the Shadows.com favorite sharing service, and offers continued support for del.icio.us.

Your Favorites, To Go – with Privacy
For each favourite, you can now choose to either store it online or keep it local. Better yet, Shadows lets you keep your online favorites private, so you can get your favorites from any computer without publishing them to the world. Shadows also stores your Flock collection structure. The net effect: if you’re using Shadows, you can get your favorites “to go.”

Import Firefox Settings
Flock 0.5.13 imports your bookmarks, passwords, cookies, etc. from Firefox and other browsers. Flock tags your imported bookmarks based on Firefox folder names, and lets you find them from the ol’ search box.

Firefox 1.5 Style Auto Update
Flock 0.5.13 uses the same cool auto-update system as Firefox 1.5.

New Flickr Photo Uploader
Now you can drag and drop to upload your Flickr photos. You’ll find it in the Topbar menu, which is the thingy in the upper left area of ​​your browser that says “Flock Faves” when you first install 0.5.13.

Spell checking
We have incorporated SpellBound, an open source spell checker. You can spell check not only blog posts, but the contents of any form field. Right-click in any form field to see this option.

Upgraded RSS Viewer
In the favorites manager, you’ll often see orange RSS icons next to collections. Clicking on an RSS icon gives you an aggregated RSS view for everything in that folder (much faster and cleaner than in 0.4.10). Try putting a few items into a collection and sort by topic (using the selector in the upper right corner). Flock now does statistical text analysis to group similar articles together.

Photo Browser
You can now log on to Flickr and search for photos by tags and text. Keep tabs on your friends, instantly. Tip: leave the search field blank in the Flickr topbar to search for “everybody” (Flickr.com’s global photo stream).

New Blog Engine
The blog editor has a new engine, TinyMCE. When you click the Feather button, the blog editor opens in a new tab.

Search
Search results no longer open in a new tab.

Categories
Flock 0.5.13 has support for categories in WordPress and other MT API blog platforms.

Shelf As Top Bar
You’ll find the Shelf in the Topbar menu. You can view Shelf items in a list; icon view will come later (promise!).

Technorati Top bar
Find out what people are saying about any web page that interests you. Follow conversations.

Maps Top bar
Drag an address to this topbar, and Flock maps it for you.

Photobucket support
In addition to Flickr, you may now choose to use Photobucket with the Photo Browser and Photo Uploader topbars. To do this, visit the Photo Sharing tab in the Web Services section of Flock’s Preferences dialog, and select Photobucket from the dropdown menu. Switching photo services requires Flock to be restarted, and you’ll be prompted to do this after making your selection. After switching services, the Photo Browser and Uploader interfaces will change to reflect the feature set of the new service.

Unicode in Photo Uploader
Multibyte UTF-8 characters in the title, description, and tag fields were mangled on upload in 0.5.12; this has been corrected.

Despite all of the cool stuff we have added, there are still plenty of things we didn’t get to. So with a promise to tackle these ASAP, here is a list of some of the things that currently don’t work and make us shy away from calling this Flock 0.6:

• Some of the user flows need to be re-worked.
• In the favorites manager, you can no longer view your favorites by tag. You can see the tags for individual favorites, and use the search field to find favorites by tag. We’re working on restoring the tag view ASAP.
• Feed Service performance — RSS in Flock could get dog slow under certain conditions. bug #1606 RSS feeds update every hour; if you have a lot of feeds the refresh may be slower than you’d like. Workaround: view the individual feed and click the Reload button.
• Private online favorites are made public if you switch from a service that supports private online favorites (Shadows) to one that does not (del.icio.us). bug#2345
• If you are using an online favorites service, there is a delay between starring a favorite and being able to view it online.
• If you star (favorite) a page that has a feed view and requires authentication (user name and password), then whenever Flock refreshes your feeds, unless you are logged into that site Flock prompts for your user name and password. (Adding annoyance, these prompts will seem to appear at random.) Workaround: In the favorites manager, delete any feeds that require authentication (for instance, the gmail feed). To delete the feed without deleting the favorite itself, expand the favorite, highlight only the feed, and press Delete. This unsubscribes you from the feed but keeps your favorite intact. bug#1205
• Flock doesn’t recognize Macromedia Flash on Windows. bug #2396. It’ll work under many scenarios, but not always
• “Star These Tabs” not working. bug#2518

Finally, there is a list of several hundred bug reports and ideas for feature improvements. So be prepared for crashes and occasional data losses. Still, try using Flock 0.5.13 for a full day. And other another, and another… That’s what we do.