While waiting in line at a craft store today, I saw the item pictured here in a display by the cash register. Next to it were some other “Flocked Minis” of Halloween figures (ghosts and pumpkins), but for my purchasing power, the birds were it. (There were also some little bears that I almost always think about getting for my daughter when I see them, but they didn’t come in the tangentially-Flock-relevant packaging, so I opted out of those once again.)

Flock's usability guru, Will Tschumy, posted the other day about topbars and how useful they are. Just last week, I was thinking about the usefulness of topbars and was going to do a blog post, but other priorities slid in front of it, and I put the post aside. Since one of Will's proposals is to use bottombars instead of topbars and I'm wildly, passionately opposed to that, I thought I should go ahead and post my feedback.

First, let me take a moment to revel in the past. Once upon a time, we had a thing called the shelf that lived in a happy little sidebar. This was way before Flock was even Flock. (Disclosure: I wrote that version of the shelf and so may have an overzealous fondness for it, though I'll say right now that many of the things in the current version of the shelf are hands-down better than in the first version; it's just the user interaction that I find unpalatable.) We later moved the shelf into a popup window, and then into a topbar and ultimately into the bottombar that it currently occupies. Although I like the core functionality of the shelf (seriously, I gushed here about how it helped me to blog more and be more productive), I find it unusable because it's a bottombar. There are two key issues that make its being a bottombar a big problem for me.

It's confirmed -- Knoxville's second Flock meetup will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday (tomorrow) at the Barne's and Noble on Kingston Pike (yes, we do know about books here in the south). We'll gather in the cafe area. We're a small group so far (but bigger than last time), and anybody in the area is welcome to stop by. I've got some nifty buttons to give out and, FedEx willing, I'll have one or two tee-shirts that people can fight over. Other than that, we'll just talk Flock. I hope to have a chance to give an overview of things to come and to answer any questions I'm able to about where we are with the software. Admittedly, since I'm on the web end of things now rather than the client side, my knowledge on that front is more limited than in the past. In any case, it should be a good event. Naturally, unless it's a real snoozer, I'll report on how it went. Consider this an invitation to other community members to hold meetups and to do status reports afterward. You'll have to check this with Community Ambassador Will Pate, but I gather we're getting much closer now to being ready for spread-like campaigns, and meetups seem to me like as good a way as any to participate.

Back in March, I more or less presided over a small Flock meetup in Knoxville. We've come a long way since March, and given the recent releases, I thought it might be a good time to hold another meetup event, this time with hopefully a slightly broader reach. Including myself, I can count on four participants this time and may be able to garner a fifth. If I break six, I'll be pretty happy; Knoxville isn't exactly browseropolis, you know. If you happen to be in the Knoxville area and are interested in meeting some other Flock users or just want to find out more, please let me know by email (daryl at flock dot com), and I'll fill you in on the details as I firm up plans. Tentatively, I'm looking at finding a book store or coffee shop with wifi on Wednesday or Thursday evening next week.

On June 24, my daughter turned two years old. We had an extended-family party for her, and my wife baked star cupcakes. As party favors for the kids, she had made some blue and green tie-dyed tee shirts, and one of the kids' activities was going to be making tie-dyed sock puppets.  It was pretty nifty. (Yes, you turn into a weirdo when you have kids.) I mentioned that since she was going to have blue star cupcakes to match the shirts anyway, we should shoot a picture of one for me to post as a flockstar. She went the extra mile and added the Flock logo on her own, and here it is. As far as I know, this is the first Flock baked good.

Using Flock of late, my experience has been at times as follows:

• Browse a bit.
• Oh, the orange photo button just lit up. Let’s see what we’ve got.
• Ah, another out-of-focus mobile phone photo of Jimbob’s dog rolling around on the rug.
• Browse for five more minutes. There goes the orange button again.
• Nice, another picture of Jimbob’s dog.
• Read email and come back to the browser. Hey, the photo button’s orange again. I hope it’s not…
• Hmm, well, it’s not his dog, but it is another out-of-focus shot of something yellow. Maybe a closeup of a pencil? Or a traffic light? Ok, back to work.
• Three minutes later, Jimbob’s dog again.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the photo notification functionality. Before I had it at my disposal, I never thought to go look at my friends’ flickr photos, and so the feature will probably help me keep abreast of what my friends are doing. (And once some issues are ironed out on Linux, it’ll probably entice me to begin using Flickr to upload my photos.) In its current form, with some of the contacts I happen to have on my list, the photo topbar provides more of a distraction than a benefit. It provokes me far too often to stop what I’m doing so that I can look at photos of little consequence. It’s not that I don’t enjoy seeing pictures of Jimbob’s dog and inadvertent abstract shots, but I wish I could set the frequency with which the topbar notified me of new photos.

I picked up the latest Flock milestone build (read: blessed by QA for testing by a broader community audience) this morning and am impressed. I have some beefs and some very positive impressions.

I don’t find the “web snippets” terribly useful anymore for a couple of reasons. First, I’m not a mousing type of guy, and when I do use the mouse, it’s generally in the top half of my screen, where one typically finds application buttons and where I tend to do much of my reading (I scroll down as my eye nears the bottom third or quarter of a screen of text). So having to drag things down to the bottom of the screen is a liability for me. It might not be as much of a liability if I weren’t primarily a laptop/scrollpad user, and if I were a Mac user accustomed to darting my mouse down to the dock at the bottom of the screen, this might be more usable to me. A couple of months ago, I blogged about how the shelf was making blogging easier for me and had increased my output. It had plenty of warts and boils even then, but I frequently found myself adding snippets to it as little pre-drafts for blog posts, quick notes to capture thoughts I wanted to get at later. I find that I’m not doing this as much lately, though it’s quite possible that’s thanks to my own sloth rather than attributable to changes in the shelf/snippet area.

I picked up the latest Flock milestone build (read: blessed by QA for testing by a broader community audience) this morning and am impressed. I have some beefs and some very positive impressions.I don’t find the “web snippets” terribly useful anymore for a couple of reasons. First, I’m not a mousing type of guy, and [...]

Six months or so ago, I wrote the current version of Flock’s extensions site. It’s pretty simple and was intended to be simple. It wound up being even simpler than originally planned and has plenty of functionality hidden because we haven’t had a need for it or the ability to support it. We’ve thought a lot about various approaches to making extensions available, and I blogged some of those thoughts a few months ago. The quick summary is that we were waffling over whether to enforce quality for Flock extensions by officially hosting only a few or whether to have a free-for-all, or whether to blend the approaches. We ultimately decided on a blended approach, and we planned to launch a new extensions site in early February with the launch of the 0.5 release of Flock. For various reasons, that didn’t pan out.