One of the interesting things in trying to design a user experience in an open source environment is the balance between doing the things we need to do as a company versus keeping the community involved and informed. So, with that said, let me see if I can provide an overview of what we're thinking the goals are for the next version of Flock, from a user experience perspective.
In Danphe, we want to set in place the user experience pattern Flock 1.0 through (hopefully) Flock 2.0. What this means is that as we add additional objects into the browser (e.g., People), we don't want to have to revamp the entire experience to support it - new objects and actions just plug in. After many, many (no really, many!) meetings, we've come up with the following overall UX Pattern:
As you all know, one of the most distinctive aspects of the Flock user experience is our photo top bar. The topbar is great for
1. Quickly dragging and dropping photos to create a photo comment
2. Quickly uploading photos
3. Visually navigating photo sites like Flickr and Photobucket
Some of the things the topbar isn't as good at are:
1. Notifications of new photos
2. Being able to see a group of photos (and not just public photos on Flickr or Photobucket)
Right now, we're hard at work on the next version of Flock. We're working on ways that will preserve the best aspects of Flock's user experience (topbars included), and either solve or create new solutions for some of the areas that need improvement. Part of this is extending and enhancing the topbars (including allowing you to use the topbar to view more than just photos). Look for a more complete blog post about the user experience in the next version of Flock soon.
