According to Wikipedia, a Cormorant is a medium-to-large seabird. Why am I telling you this? Because "Cormorant" is the code name for our new successor release to Cardinal (our current 0.7.x release), and before Danphe.

Now you may ask why is Flock doing a release before Danphe. It comes from us doing an assessment of the features of Danphe (especially the people sidebar) and realizing we had a lot more work to do for us to feel ready to release it. At the same time, we noted several things:

• Even without the People feature, Flock trunk (our active development branch) has a lot of improvements over the currently shipping 0.7 release ("Cardinal"), such as being based on Firefox 2, having bookmarks with folders (yay!), and adding video previewing to the photobar, not to mention a lot of improvements in Blogging, News, and photo uploading. We received a lot of great feedback from you -- our community -- that a milestone release as soon as possible with all the new value, including getting Flock out on the FF2 platform - was important.
• Secondly, we'd like to address some of the issues around feature discoverability and performance/stability that is adding noise to the process of getting feedback on Flock's features. By fixing some of these things, we're hoping people will be able to react to the experience we're creating as opposed to being asked to overlook glitches or not even realize some of the features we provide.
• Finally, our last major release was in June, and we want to re-establish momentum with you, our users, and the marketplace. We want to open up the conversation in both directions and make sure we're giving you early opportunities to tell us what's working well for you, what isn't, and what you'd like to see us change or add.

So there you have it. If you'd like to follow the progress of Cormorant, you can download previews of where we're going from http://tinderbox.flock.com/builds/trunk -- and please give us feedback!

Thanks, as always, for your interest and support,

Mark

Here at Flock HQ we’ve been busy thinking, discussing, whiteboarding and now prototyping ideas for the next release of Flock, code-named “Danphe” (which, as we’ve learned, is a multicolored pheasant and the national bird of Nepal – other “D” bird names didn’t make the cut, but that’s another story).

We’re trying to get a good part of that thinking out onto wiki.flock.com in the next week, but I wanted to give you some highlights now (since much of what we are doing is driven from the great feedback we continue to get in our forums and mailing lists). Your continued feedback and ideas are welcome!

The Cardinal release is really coming together -- the team has been working very hard. With Thursday's Milestone 8 build, we feel that the Photobar, Photo Uploader, Blogging, Favorites, and Web Snippets are nearly complete, modulo some small bug fixes or integration of feedback we're still receiving from the community and usability sessions. Now would be a good time to give them a thorough workout, if you've been holding back!

We still have some substantial changes to make to News, Search, the First-Run Experience, and Configuration, which we're hoping to complete most of by Milestone 9 (Tuesday, May 16th) and certainly Milestone 10 (Thursday, May 18th), at which point we will be trying to build our first release candidate.