Flock needs your help
When Flock 0.5.11 was released I decided to give it an entire day to win me over, and in some ways it did.
Flock 0.5.11 interface
I have a lot of fun trying out new software. I think that fun stems from the fact that I feel like I have some say of the direction of the application, when I leave feedback for the developers to make changes based on my experiences. However, that fun runs thin quite quickly with Flock.
Flock, at least on the Macintosh, is incredibly slow. Although it has not crashed on me, or halted my system, this has happened to at least three other people I’ve spoken to.
Speed aside, I’ve been sure to leave feedback as often as I can while using the application and I try to jot down exactly what I’d like to see and how I’m using the application. The development team has been incredibly responsive to my requests, but we’ll see what they do with those requests as they edge closer to a 1.0 release.
While using Flock, I noticed how uncomfortable I was with a small development team being responsible for the interaction between a browser and these Web services. I was unable to come up with a solid answer when I asked myself whether or not that responsibility should be thrown on the developers of the browser, or on the developers of the Web service, or on the community at large. This is something I’ll have to give a lot more thought before I figure it all out.
They need your help. I do not know how much feedback they get from each release, but I am sure they could use more. Either that, or they need to listen more closely. Flock isn’t just an application, its a suite of smaller applications thrown ontop of a complex application - each of which needs a huge amount of attention and testing before Flock can truly fly. So as they release each build, be sure to leave tons of feedback, because as much as Flock (the browser portion) looks good, the rest of the application still needs a lot of work - and the direction they go can only come from you.
Oh, and please plug the memory leaks, my god.
I used Flock for two days, and am now back on Safari.
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Good review. I tried it back in September or something like that and I wasn’t impressed. I’ve been thinking about giving the new version a shot when I have the time to really put it through some loops.
Chris Coleman on February 23rd, 2006 12:30 pm
Yeah, the more people that try it out - on different platforms, configurations, and computers - and actually provide valuable feedback - the less the excuses the devs have for Flock to continue to suck.
Colin D. Devroe on February 23rd, 2006 1:12 pm
I just ran it through the wringer and put a review of my thoughs on my site. BTW, I like to the new Uber look.
Dennis on February 24th, 2006 3:20 pm
Thanks for the kudo’s on the new TUG.n Dennis. It took longer than anticipated and there were a few bumps in the road but it’s mostly done now, just some minor tweaks here and there.
Mike Stickel on February 28th, 2006 12:04 pm
I’d give it a try, but doesn’t work with Textpattern blogs, of all things.
Paul D on March 1st, 2006 7:32 am
Paul D: It is extensible (just like Firefox). So you might want to have your hand at building your own extension for your browser.
Colin D. Devroe on March 1st, 2006 9:24 am
I like it. It has a very nice built in RSS aggregator which is something I think the next version of Firefox should have. Also the faves manager is a nice feature, though I have some minor gripes with the UI. And for some reason the RSS doesn’t update untill you restart the browser.
Tommy on March 1st, 2006 11:23 am
Thanks for the more balanced feedback, Colin. I think your comments are definitely fair — and I absolutely feel ya about the speed. It’s abysmal (even on my 1.67GHz PowerBook with 2GB of RAM)!!
So yes, we definitely hear you on the speed problems. We’re going to be upgrading our version of cLucene (the real bottle neck) which will fix a bunch of memory leaks and ideally speed up the browser. Firefox 1.5 itself has a bunch of slowness, so we’ve got to figure out what things we can delay and what things need to be instant. For now we’ve focused more on feature development and rolling those ideas out rather than optimization (I remember a saying about the futility of premature optimization).
Anyway, yes, we hear ya on the speed front.
Regarding your suggestion to send us feedback — I think what might be better is actually to blog about your experiences in Flock and tag it with flockfeedback. Our QA-man Lloyd is the one who gets every email sent to our feedback address. In the week or so since 0.5.12 has been out, he’s received 500 pieces — 98% of which he’s probably already responded to… But it’s really too much for him to respond to adequately, especially when we get a lot of repeat feedback — and the goal should be enriching the dialogue.
Getting this stuff out in the open in blogs makes it easier to find out where the pain points are and for you, who are creating the feedback, a way to substantiate your comments by being able to link to others who have had similar experiences.
Anyway, I’m all in favor of getting more feedback — and you’re right, putting it on your blogs, more than anything, puts a challenge out to the Flock devs to solve the problems that people are talking about and turning Flock from an interesting idea into your most ass-kicking browser.
Chris Messina on March 2nd, 2006 9:16 pm
Chris Messina: I appreciate you stopping by and for your feedback. Sounds like you need a bug/suggestion tracker!
A lot of what Flock is trying to accomplish interests me, for sure, so I will keep my eye on your project. And I look forward to creating more in-depth feedback for yourself and your developers to sink your teeth into.
Colin D. Devroe on March 3rd, 2006 9:50 am
Thank you Colin for drumming up participation in the open source project Flock!
All the feedback is considered carefullly, particularly the bug reports, and reoccurring suggestions.
Blogs are the best suggestion tracker I know of.
All the best to you,
Lloyd D Budd
Flock QA (Qommunity and quality Assurance)
Flock / http://flock.com
Lloyd D Budd on March 5th, 2006 2:18 am