Posted January 18, 2007 - 12:06pm by Mark Towfiq

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

 

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Comments

Thank you, thank you, thank you.
The wonderful built in spell check of FF2 (along with a couple of stability issues from past versions) is what has been keeping me off of flock for the last couple of months.

I look forward to a solid 1.0 release though.

So when can we expect to see an official release of Cormorant?

Thanks, Mark, for providing us with more insight into Cormorant. Is there an estimated timeline for its release that you can make public?

Is there a reason why the builds page is empty? Or am I missing something?

@keepingitreal: the dev team is in the process of estimating the different pieces of work and we'll be reviewing the schedule tomorrow. It is probably a matter of weeks.

@Chris: Ah, sorry -- it's one level down from the original link I included. I've updated the post accordingly.

I'm enjoying Cormorant. I bit the bullet and downloaded an hourly build tonight. While I was a bit worried about installing it, it installed fine, uninstalling Flock 0.8 automatically and migrating contents from the old profile over to Cormorant.

It's still a bit rough around the edges, but there's definitely progress being made toward a full 1.0 release.

Nice work (pity my partial translation into Italian doesn't work with Cormorant too). I was looking forward to Undo close tab, it's addicting :D
I wonder why Mediabar doesn't work with me.

LOVE IT! One thing that kept me using Firefox was the bookmarks in Flock - hated having to click those extra few times. Now that bookmarks are more like FF, I am now officially only using Flock. Thanks for the great changes1

Thanks for offering this.

I tried it and like what I saw. However, I panicked when I went to Gizmodo and tried adding their RSS feeds: Flock began producing tabs. Lots of it.

I'm back to the "old" Flock but will of course upgrade when the right time comes.

All the best!

Is there a way in Cormorant to bold feeds that have new entries in the left bar like the previous versions, and also make the font customizable? I admittedly spend more time browsing the feeds than on the webpages, and I do have a lot of feeds open on the left. It would help if feeds with new entries make themselves visible. Thanks.

Just curious....

Will the mac builds be universal binaries in Cormorant? :)

When I saw "having bookmarks with folders (yay!)" I thought about gagging.

I downloaded the newest trunk, and then I threw up.

I cannot believe the awesome organization of the collections management has been done away with. That was what really made Flock stellar for me and the reason I use it over FF. It really really made Flock stand out and NOT seem like a bunch of extensions thrown together into a browser.

Looks like I'll have to never update - which I don't know is an option as I don't want to be using an insecure code-base two years down the road.

Please bring back the favorites collections and not the lame bookmark folders... it's completely unorganized, uninspired, and boring. What numskull pushed for this! Where can I officially complain?

Where did the "mail" link go? Is it coming back?

cholmes

@anonymous -- the News Reader is still in Cormorant, and it bolds the feeds with unread items.

@Devin -- yes (they already are in Cardinal/0.7).

@Terces -- Collections in Cardinal are just folders that can't nest; we're adding nesting in Cormorant (probably the #1 feature request). We are also looking at adding "smart folders": folders based on tags (may not make Cormorant though). What feature do you think you're losing with this change?

@cholmes -- not sure what "mail" link you're referring to?

Just curious, I went to the trunk and could not find any mention of this version of Flock. Checking around in the levels above the build page for 7.99 and still could not find it. Any ideas?

Positives:

  • Many of the new UI elements are great, esp. the + to add a new tab and the feed manager in the sidebar
  • I (think I) like how accounts / services are set up when you log into a service, instead of having to walk through a setup process
  • The option to bookmark locally or to any of my online bookmark services

Negatives:

  • del.icio.us doesn't 'remember' me. I'm prompted every few minutes to enter my info. Actually, none of the services 'remember' me. I must currently be logged into that service. I guess that's not a deal breaker
  • The (apparent) lack of defaults for bookmarking. I don't store my bookmarks locally, I only want to use del.icio.us. I want to click on the star and have it submit to del.icio.us. I understand why this may not be the default behavior, but I want the ability to make it the default for me. Choosing 'Publish Page' from the 'Favorites' dropdown is not the same.
  • The loss of 'Favorites on the Web'. There is no quick way for me to get to del.icio.us any longer
  • The new Online Bookmarks flyout; that thing is a monster. I have no idea how many tags I have, but I can scroll for 20+ seconds. Then it pauses each time I stop on a tag while it talks to del.icio.us and gets my bookmarks. It's just an abomination. Can I turn it off, or get tag bundles?

I've been really happy with Flock in the past (my only complaint was an 'unresponsive script' error I would get, which was due to my large number of del.icio.us bookmarks), but the way this release handles bookmarks is quite upsetting.

And one note about the blog, I can't preview / post as JFSIII because that's the name of a registered user (me), but there's no place to login on the blog pages.

So, I went out to the forum, logged in as me, JFSIII, and returned to this post. I CTRL+Refreshed the page, hoping it would now recognize me as JFSIII (since I am logged in) but no dice. I still cannot preview my reply as JFSIII because that's the name of a registered user (me :)

I'm really not this negative. I do have positive things to say :)

Restarted Flock and came back to the forum and I'm now allowed to post as JFSIII.

I don't know what's up with the strange formatting of the parent post or this reply; they appear to have well-formed ul's.

I downloaded 1171417401.9614 for Linux and noticed

  • The interesting Share This Link icon. That's pretty cool, more promotion of sharing.
  • The bookmarking operations now offer (or did before and I didn't notice) 'Publish to these services by default'
  • The favorites dialog still insists on bookmarking items locally for me. I have zero interest in local bookmarks and would like this to be optional.
  • Delete this bookmark doesn't seem to work either locally or online

Forgot about this one, then it happened as soon as I posted my 2nd post.

My browser will lock up tight as a drum for 5-10 seconds then I get an 'unresponsive script' error for:
components/flockDeliciousService.js:358

It's KILLING me.

I have just downloaded the latest Mac build and am loving it. My two issues:

* In previous versions of Flock (and in most browsers), typing "flock" in the address bar would default to flock.com. But, defaulting to .com seems to have gone away. is this a "feature" or a bug? I really miss it.

* In the build I have downloaded (Mac 1171767767.9684), I can't add Accounts and Services. The icons that should be at the top of the Accounts and Services window just aren't there.

Keep up the good work, guys. Looking forward to the final release!

Marc :-)

I love Flock. It's my main browser. But there are three things about Flock for OSX that drive me crazy...

1. I cannot find a way to change the search bar from Yahoo to something else permanently... and the searchbar text handling is atrocious.

2. If the upload window is open and I close the browser window, there is no [obvious] way to open a new browser window. I have to switch to another browser or wait for the upload to finish.

3. A bookmark URL is not editable when in the bookmark properties. The Bookmark NAME is but not the URL string. I have javascript strings saved as bookmarks in Firefox (eg: "javascript:moveTo(10,10);window.resizeTo(1024,screen.availHeight*.5)"). At one point I imported my FF bookmarks to Flock, but now they are not editable in Flock.... or are they?!?

qwesds

Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! tanwmmcgcm

Air

Where did the Mail icon go? And, I guess, more importantly how do I get it back? Other than that I really like Flock 9!

Hi, I'm Turkish science communicator.rüya tabirleri I like very very much Nature Podcast.
Congratulations!

Thanks, Mark.

Where did the Mail icon go? And, I guess, how do I get it back? Other I love Flock 9!

Regards,
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