I’m going through a bit of a New Software phase at the moment – Trying out alternatives to my tried and trusted apps.
Browser
I’ve been a longtime Firefox fan. Over the last few days though I’ve been trying out the Firefox derivative Flock.
Flock has taken the Firefox engine and integrated support for various online services, such as Flickr, GMail, Twitter, WordPress and a host of others. This allows you to keep up to date with your contacts from one place. You can also use flock to write blog posts, upload pictures to Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa.
One very cool feature of Flock is the Media Bar. If one of your contacts has uploaded new photos to Flickr, for example, click on their name in the People Sidebar and their Photostream will appear in the Media Bar at the top of the browser. You can also use the Media Bar to search for content and subscribe to media streams.
Being based on Firefox, Flock supports most of Firefox’s add-ons so it’s as customizable as you want.
Launcher
For as long as I can remember I’ve used Windows PowerPro for launching apps and to be honest I probably will continue to do so – but I thought I’d try out a couple of the new flashier launchers – namely RocketDock and Launchy.
They may look more modern but they don’t have the features and configuration options of PowerPro. I’m willing to give them a fair crack, however, and we’ll see how it goes.
