Daryl’s Flock Blog

Huh? My daughter woke up at 4:30 this morning, and I was treated to very early morning TV. We often tune in to a station called Noggin that's got some really great shows (take that, Barney). I like PBS and all, but it doesn't hold half a candle to Noggin. I usually get my daughter up around 8:00 or 8:30, and we'll tune in to Max and Ruby or Little Bear (I like Noggin, but both of these shows annoy me) while we eat some breakfast, take our Flintstones vitamins together, etc. Noggin only runs from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., so we had to entertain ourselves for the first hour-and-a-half this morning (during which time mostly I lay in a daze on the couch while my daughter piled toys on me). When the cartoons started rolling, I was treated to a new (to me) show called Tiny Planets (review). The basic premise is that two fluffy white aliens fly around on their fluffy white couch to various planets in their area. One is the planet of light and color; another is a music planet; another is a nature planet; I think there are six in all. As they catapult around (literally — their couch is slung from their home base by a huge catapult attached to a cord by which they're ultimately reeled back in) to the various planets, they experience various adventures and misadventures that afford them ample opportunity to try to use critical thinking skills to get out of the jams they find themselves in. It's a neat little show, a CGI cartoon that's wacky and strange, but fun.

A couple of times, as they were sling-shotting through space, they passed an asteroid on which three creatures were running around (that is, they were running in place with the asteroid spinning under their feet). The first time the narrator pointed them out, I wasn't sure what she called them. The next time, I thought it sounded vaguely like "flockers." And then a third time, in reference to similar creatures on one of the planets, I was pretty sure that's what they were called. And sure enough, when I looked it up, I learned that these critters are called flockers. They're described in an epinions review of the show as "a bird-like alien whose intelligence can best be described as 'dim.'" Luckily, our own flockers far outpace these guys.

So, there's not much of real relevance to Flock here, but this was a fun little discovery. If you've got kids and are fed up with Barney and the other usual suspects, check out the Noggin web site and consider queuing Tiny Planets up in your TiVo if you're not game for an early morning with your little ones.

technorati tags: flock

Perry, Mike, and I met yesterday to talk Flock. I’ve known Mike for a long time, but it was nice to get to meet another local Flocker in Perry. We didn’t have any formal agenda. One might say we, ahem, winged it. It’s hard to remember everything we went over. I know I asked a lot of questions, many of them pertaining to things I’d dearly love to see changed in Flock. For example:

• How do you feel about the way the Performancing extension appears at the bottom of your browser window without disrupting your browsing context? (I’d consider giving the enamel off one of my eye-teeth if it would convince our dev crew to implement something similar in Flock.) Mike’s on board with me; Perry could go either way, though he agrees with me that having the blog editor in a tab beats having it in a separate window.
• What would you think of having a find-like dialog for tagging? This is something we implemented way back before Flock was Flock and we were writing an extension rather than a browser. Here’s the idea. If you click the star button, your favorite gets added, just as it does now. But instead of having to double-click to produce a tagging dialog that takes a couple of seconds to load and takes up half your screen, a little find-like toolbar appears at the bottom of the screen. If you don’t start typing tags, it goes away after three or four seconds. if you do start typing tags, it stays put until a few seconds after you’ve last typed or until you dismiss it manually. Other controls (e.g. for privacy) could appear in this dialog as well. The beauty of the thing is that it’s unobtrusive, it’s highly discoverable, and it’s smart (it knows to go away if you don’t start typing pretty quickly). I would consider giving the enamel off my other eye-tooth to see this implemented.
• What do you make of this whole tagging and web 2.0 business? I tend to be skeptical of such trendy things and am always curious what others — and particularly others not under the cliquish spell that seems to have been cast on all living in or near Silicon Valley — think.

I’m sure I hounded them with other questions as well, most of them part of a program to validate (or tear down) some of my own impressions about Flock. I hope it wasn’t too annoying. Some other things that came out of the discussion include the following:

• Perry continues to have a weird behavior wherein, sporadically, typing an apostrophe while in the blog editor produces the find dialog and thus prevents him from using the apostrophe key as expected. Has anybody else experienced this?
• Mike’s unable to save blog entries to his server (blogger) as drafts. This’d be valuable as a preview mechanism because in many cases, one has to go in and hack source to get the styling to fit with the blog’s styles.
• It’d be nice if there were a preference that would tell the photo topbar what size image to drag by default.
• A better tagging story in the blog editor would be nice, but it’s tricky to build a blog editor that handles features not present in most blogging software, so the poverty of the technorati tagging implementation is understandable for now.
• We may look into my giving a presentation to a general computer users’s group here in Knoxville. I wonder if any community members have started working on S5 or similar presentations about Flock. I rather doubt it, but I’d guess that the next few months would be a ripe time to start thinking along those lines.

There was more, but these were the high points.  We also chatted briefly about gadgets, screencasting software, the slow bandwidth at Panera, and other miscellany. I thought it was a fun outing, and it’s nice to meet up with folk who’re enthusiastic about a project you’re involved in. I hope more Flock users come out of Knoxville’s woodwork and that they express an interest in future meetups. I’d also love to hear about similar gatherings elsewhere.

technorati tags: flock, community, meetup

While writing my little announcement about the Flock meetup in Knoxville, I decided to catch up a bit on Perry’s blog, and I discovered that he had recently posted about creating a video demonstrating the favorites manager. It’s pretty nifty. I do remember seeing one other screencast of Flock in action a while back (thanks, AdminID), but otherwise, I can’t think of any rich media out there about Flock, besides a few podcasts, one of which was produced by the third Knoxville meetup participant, Mike Neel. Has anybody else encountered other community-produced rich media out there about Flock? We should gather up any links and document them on the wiki, if the little collection linked here doesn’t represent the total picture.

technorati tags: flock, community, podcast

Flock community member Perry Nelson has taken the initiative to organize a meetup in Knoxville, where I happen to preside over the Southern branch of Flock’s world domination network (from my spare bedroom office high-tech control room). This is in response to something I blogged a couple of months ago about meetups. Sadly, in spite of the immeasurable power I wield here at Flock HQ South, Knoxville’s not exactly a bustling metropolis of of the bleeding edge web. So there’s limited interest in the area. If you happen to be in the area and just not on my radar, feel free to stop by. We’re meeting tomorrow at Panera in West Knoxville at 1:00 p.m. If the stars align correctly, I’ll manage to bring my laptop, and we’ll look at and talk a little bit about Flock. So far, we’ve got just three confirmed in attendance, and I suspect that’s where we’ll land. I’ll blog a post mortem if there’s anything of note to report.

Is anybody else doing Flock meetups yet? If so, what’re you doing at them? If not, why not, and what would you do at them? 

technorati tags: community, flock

The science fiction child actor everybody loves to hate gave Flock a brief review today. To be fair to Wil, not everybody loves to hate him anymore. In fact, droves of people have enjoyed reading his blog for years, and I remember being impressed, when I first encountered it during my Fark phase a few years ago, that a celebrity had bothered to learn how to code and had written his own blogging software. It seemed so down to earth and cool and dorky in a way that appeals to me. But enough fan-boying. As a little aside in an entry about retooling his web presence, Wil mentioned Flock (along with Performancing and Ecto) as a blogging tool he had tried out. His verdict?

Flock is pretty cool. It’s got a nice editor, and I especially like how it seamlessly integrates Flickr images and del.icio.us bookmarks into your blogging experience. It integrates lots of tools and appears geared toward blogging and anything which involves a tag. If I was all about that sort of thing, I’d be really into flock, but since I’m not, I can’t see myself using it.

And a perfectly reasonable and fair verdict it is on the surface. We’ve known all along that we’re not going to appeal very much yet to the general web user. Of course, part of what we’re doing is trying to change the way people think about and use the web, so we’re hoping to expand our audience over time by improving the way the web works. We can do this in part by helping to showcase the usefulness of things like microformats, tagging, etc.

In that vein, let me posit that the whole tagging thing need not be as scary or as web-2.0-trendy as it sounds. I don’t care about tagging for tagging’s sake, but I do find it to be a useful ad hoc way of categorizing things. If we built some auto-completion into Flock’s favorites tagging UI (and I don’t even mean auto-complete that taps into social networks; just a list of tags I’ve applied to links), it’d be all the more useful and would help me build consistent taxonomies around my favorites without having to rely on my memory (e.g., I can never remember whether I tag things “javascript” or “js”).

From a technical standpoint, using tags isn’t different at all from using categories. In each case, you have a database row tying a taxonomy term to another piece of data. The difference between tags and categories, as far as I can tell, has to do strictly with user interface (some would argue that it requires a different mindset). I find tags in Flock useful not because they’re trendy and web-2.0ish, but because they help me streamline how I manage my favorites. Here’s how:

• When I’m adding a link, rather than traversing a many-tiered series of nested menus to find a folder, I just type a tag. Adding auto-complete or a clickable list of likely candidates for tags would make this even more useful to me.
• When I’m looking for a link in the favorites manager, I just type a likely tag in the search widget at the bottom. It almost instantly narrows my list of favorites down to links I’ve applied a given tag (or fragment) to. It also happens to do a full text search and show matching links.

Part of the beauty of this approach is that even though we call the tool the favorites manager, I don’t actually have to do any management of my favorites. I save a link, and I can find it easily without being daunted, after months of browsing, at the prospect of having to navigate through six layers of menus to get to a link that legacy bookmarking systems allow me to categorize exactly one way without duplication of effort. If I’m not inclined to tag my links, I don’t have to, and Flock still provides a full-text search that lets me find relevant content I’ve visted more easily than otherwise. Which means that I don’t have to bother pruning old favorites or finding complex ways of categorizing them hierarchically in order to make it eaiser from a UI standpoint to find them.

So, Wil, if you happen to follow the trackback and read this, you don’t have to be a tagaholic to find Flock’s favorites features useful. If you (plural, generic you) don’t find the features useful, fair enough, but our goal — in spite of any buzz that may circulate about us — has much more to do with making it easier to use the web than with jumping on any bandwagons (though some bandwagons are heading in what we think are good directions). In order to find tagging in Flock useful, you don’t have to know much about tags or web 2.0 or whatever — you just have to see the value in the simple application of labels to links and the easy retrieval of those links later. In other words, you don’t have to be a fanatic about tagging, though it makes sense that our core audience for the time being is composed primarily of those for whom the novelty of tagging is appealing.

In spite of things I’ve blogged about the shelf here and here, I really don’t aspire to be the shelf user interaction guru. My use cases in general tend to be rather at odds with the sort of user interaction that web 2.0 current trends seem to favor, in fact. Nevertheless, Anthony did me the courtesy today of soliciting my feedback on a possible shelf relocation. Here are some options:

• Keep it in a topbar.
• Put it in a collapsed bottom bar that appears when you drag into the area.
• Make it a little popup window, as before (note that Erwan built an extension that will do this currently).
• Let it exist as both a topbar and a popup window.
• Put it in some sort of slidey drawer.

Some background might be useful here. Way way way back before what became Flock was ever even going to be a browser, the shelf was a sidebar. Later, it became a popup window. This was problematic for many users, especially those using Windows or Linux. The experience was less than ideal if you happened to run your browser maximized (as many Windows and Linux users do). And it was made worse by the fact that, at the time, the blog editor also opened in a new window. Focus among the windows was a real problem. Say you had your main browser maximized and invoked the shelf. When you clicked in the browser to drag something, the shelf would disappear behind the main window, and the only way to drag to it was to drag to the shelf’s placeholder in the taskbar and to hover there until the shelf jumped to the front, and then to drag into the shelf. The other option was to run your browser in a non-maximized configuration. (There was some problem, the nature of which I forget, with having the shelf window be always raised.) Neither of these options was ideal for me, and until the shelf became a topbar, I quit using it. Some of us were discussing this in irc today, and Vera asked why we Windows and Linux users tend to maximize our windows.

daryl: It gets in the way too, and there are focus issues on linux and windows, iirc
daryl: That is, if you have the shelf open in a popup and click on the main window, the shelf goes behind the main window and you have to drag to the task bar to make the shelf pop up and then drag onto the shelf.
daryl: Mac users often have space out to the sides of their windows where the shelf can coexist peacefully with the main browser windows, but linux and pc users seem more frequently to work in maximized or nearly-maximized mode.
daryl: I think alwaysraised works on windows and not on linux is another issue.
vera_: Daryl: any idea why linux and windows users work that way? I’ve been wondering.
daryl: vera_, I dunno. For me it’s something about maximizing workspace.
vera_: It seems so crowded..
vera_: Ah.
daryl: I don’t use my desktop to store or manipulate files, so I want every pixel I can salvage to be used for viewing content.
senatorhatty: the reason I run windows maximized is that most apps have an optimal set of dimensions for being able to see/use the tools and workspace
daryl: Right.
senatorhatty: but I don’t know what that set of dimensions is
daryl: Take even photoshop, for example.
daryl: You’ve got all those palettes floating around your content area.
daryl: The more space the app takes on the screen, the more of your content area you can work with b/c the palettes are floating farther from the center of the workspace grid.
senatorhatty: the solution of having a toolbar that takes up wht top of the screen when the app has focus even if the apop isnt maximized is a nice one
daryl: It’s all about pushing utility to the periphery so that you can focus on the main event/content
senatorhatty: *nod*

For me, the question is inverted. How can Mac users possibly stand to be so free with their workspace? How can you bear to have even a sliver of desktop visible around the margins of your applications? You can’t even maximize to full screen size on a Mac without changing your default dock settings, if I recall correctly. And yet every Mac user I’ve ever watched keeps lots of space out to the sides of the browser. Such space rendered the old popup version of the shelf pretty usable and comfortable on the Mac for all its failings under Linux and Windows.

As unofficial solicitor of feedback on the interaction design for the shelf, I have three questions (and some sub-questions):

1. Do you actually use the shelf? (If not, why not?)
2. Of the options given in the bulleted list above, which would you find the most useful way of getting at the shelf? Or is there another? (If there’s another, please describe it but also note a preference from among the ones I described.)
3. Do you run your browser maximized or in some middle-sized state? What OS do you use? And why do you choose the size you do?

I’ve gotten some good feedback on my shelf entries in the past, and I’ve gotten some good feedback in particular when I’ve directly asked for it. So, I’m asking.

technorati tags: flock, community, ui, request

I’m doing some preliminary work on a project for which it’s been suggested that I consider using JSON rather than XML as a data transport. "JSON?" you ask. "What’s that?" It stands for JavaScript Object Notation, and for those of us who’ve spent a lot of time writing javascript, it’ll look very familiar. It’s a subset of the javascript language and can be described as the convention whereby one represents object members as name/value pairs. In short, it’s a form of serialization native to javascript and is therefore understood by all modern browsers out of the box and by many other programming languages either natively or by simple extension. A javascript function can eval a JSON text string with no additional parsing needed and can then use the decoded values directly. This can be beneficial to web applications in at least two potentially notable ways:

• It eliminates the need to parse a verbose XML document into an object and then perform operations on the object.
• The format can be (though isn’t necessarily) less verbose than XML.

Transfer time and processing overhead can therefore be optimized when using JSON in some circumstances. Furthermore, for some uses, JSON might actually save programming effort required on the server side to generate XML from objects or on the client side going in the other direction.

Those advantages notwithstanding, I was originally hesitant to give JSON more than a passing glance. For most web applications that feature the sort of functionality I had in mind (including, as far as I was aware at the time, the one I’m doing R&D for), existing AJAX toolkits fit the bill, and I was inclined to use an existing AJAX toolkit rather than to implement JSON for the sheer novelty of doing so. Consider an editable grid table, for example. You have a text field with an onchange event. On change, you send a small piece of data to the server and you get a small piece of data back that tells the client how to provide UI feedback. None of the three benefits of JSON I mentioned above really apply here, as the data in both directions is small, requires almost no processing, and need not be an otherwise usable object. It’s text out, text in, and minor DOM manipulation. In such a case, JSON provides no real advantage, and you might as well go with a standard AJAX toolkit.

A colleague working on the project with me pointed out some other possible use cases, however, that might render JSON worth further investigation. For example, if the data comes down as an object, it can be sorted and have calculations performed on it more readily on the client side without a round-trip to the server and back per operation. There’s something very appealing to me about this. So I’ll be doing more diligence on JSON.

As my first foray into coding with JSON, I wanted to test the example my colleague brought up. Doing so required me to grab a few libraries, and I haven’t packaged it all up nicely, but it’d be reasonably easy to assemble these things and test this out for yourself if you’re interested. Here’s what you need to grab: 

• Services_JSON PEAR class
• sorttable.js (for client-side js table sorting goodness; this thing is superb and is a new find for me)
• oyXMLRPC.js or some other xmlrpc library for js; I modified this one to make it POST-friendly

So, in a web sandbox, save the PEAR class as JSON.php and create a file named "process.php" with the following contents:

<?php

include("JSON.php");

$rows = array();
$cols = array();

$colcount=20;

for($i=0; $i<$colcount; $i++){
        array_push($cols, "col $i");
}

for($i=0; $i<100; $i++){
        $row=array("count"      => $i);
        for($j=0; $j<$colcount; $j++){
                $row[$cols[$j] ] = substr(md5(microtime() . $cols[$colcount]),0,8);
        }
        array_push($rows, $row);
}

$response=array(
        "error"         => "0",
        "message"       => "success",
        "payload"       => $rows
);

$json = new Services_JSON();
$output = $json->encode($response);
print($output);

?>

This script generates 100 rows of 20 columns of junk data and returns it as a JSON object. In a real-world application, this would presumably be a data set returned from a database. The XMLHttpRequest issued from your client calls this script and handles the data. Now on to that part of the code. Create a file named index.html and populate it as follows:

<html>
<head>
        <title>JSON Demo</title>
        <script type="text/javascript" xsrc="sortable.js" mce_src="sortable.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" xsrc="json.js" mce_src="json.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" xsrc="xmlrpc.js" mce_src="xmlrpc.js"></script>
        <style type="text/css">
                /* Sortable tables */
                table.sortable a.sortheader {
                        background-color:#eee;
                        color:#666666;
                        font-weight: bold;
                        text-decoration: none;
                        display: block;
                }
                table.sortable span.sortarrow {
                        color: black;
                        text-decoration: none;
                }
        </style>
</head>
<body>
        <div id="container">
                <input type="text" id="thefield" name="thefield" value="" />
                <input type="button" id="thebutton" name="thebutton" value="The Button" onclick="json_request(document.getElementById('thefield').value)" />
        </div>
</body>
</html>

Note the javascript includes at the top, and be sure to name the downloaded libraries appropriately or to change the file. Now create json.js and populate it as follows:

function json_request(txt){

        var myOnComplete = function(responseText, responseXML){
                var obj = eval('(' + responseText + ')');
                var container=document.getElementById('container');
                container.appendChild(make_table(obj.payload));
                sortables_init();
        }

        var myOnLog = function(msg){
                alert(msg);
        }

        var provider = new oyXMLRPCProvider();
        provider.onComplete = myOnComplete;
        provider.onError = myOnLog;

        provider.submit("process.php?txt=" + escape(txt));
}

function make_table(data){
        var table = document.createElement('table');
        table.className='sortable';
        var tbody = document.createElement('tbody');
        for(var i=0; i<data.length; i++ ){
                var tr = document.createElement('tr');
                //Create headers on first iteration.
                if(i==0){
                        for(var field in data[i]){
                                var th = document.createElement(’th’);
                                th.innerHTML=field;
                                tr.appendChild(th);
                        }
                        tbody.appendChild(tr);
                        //Be sure to start a new row.
                        var tr = document.createElement(’tr’);
                }
                for(var field in data[i]){
                        var td = document.createElement(’td’);
                        td.innerHTML=data[i][field];
                        td.className=field;
                        tr.appendChild(td);
                }
                tbody.appendChild(tr);
        }
        table.appendChild(tbody);
        table.id="table_" + Math.floor ( Math.random ( ) * 100 );
        return table;
}

If you get everything linked up correctly, the result should be that when you press the button on the main page, a JSON object is pulled down asynchronously from the server and appended to the page as a table of data. Each such table is independently sortable without round trips to the server and back (and without your having to write sorting validation code to prevent SQL injection attacks, etc.). Of course, this does degrade poorly for browsers in which javascript is disabled. In any case, I’ve modeled one bit of functionality that’s pretty painless to implement using JSON, and I suspect that further work in this direction will turn up even more interesting results.

For more information on JSON, be sure to hit the JSON site. 

technorati tags: json, ajax, javascript

Even as an employee of Flock, I was a late adopter, or at any rate, I was late among the early adopters. I hate to say it, but our browser didn’t add much value that was useful to me, and it was a little flakey on top of that, so dogfeeding obligation aside, I had little incentive to fire the browser up. I’ve been using it as my only browser for six or seven weeks now, though, and particularly in the last two or three weeks, I’ve started to find that it adds specific value to my experience.

First, a bit on how Flock still doesn’t add value. I can’t use Flock to blog at my personal blog if I want to apply useful tags to my posts without having to double edit. I have a copy of wordpress installed, with the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin installed to let me add tags complete with sometimes maligned tag cloud. Because wordpress doesn’t support real tagging and Flock understandably can’t just include a hack to address the issue, I can’t use Flock to write at my personal blog as I’d like to write there. For my Flock blog, however, where real tagging isn’t an option for me anyway and I’m happy to just use categories, I can and do use Flock’s blog editor. And it’s as fine and dandy as any rich text editor for composition on the web. In fact, Flock and wordpress.com appear to use the same editor, and having it integrated into my browser is nice, if not something I’d switch browsers over, particularly given the existence of the Performancing extension for Firefox.

Where Flock of late has begun to win me over and in fact to make me a more prolific contributor to the web (for better or for worse) is in the shelf. And it’s done so in not quite expected ways that may or may not be instructive to Flock’s user interaction designer types. I don’t often blog quotes or images, and on the rare occasion that I blog a link, it’s usually one like those listed in this entry that are familiar to me and easy enough to remember and type in without cluttering up a shelf. It’s the "Add Note" button that has drawn me in. You see, while I don’t often blog media or links, I am very forgetful. I frequently dupe myself into thinking I’ll remember to blog something when I have more to say on the subject at a later time, but in the absence of any sort of scratchpad to remind me about these things, I usually forget.

Enter the shelf, where I press the "Add Note" button, type a quick little memo, and dismiss the window, without losing browser context by going to a full blog entry window. My shelf currently contains the following items:

• The Impeach Project
• How I use Flock, the shelf being a very good thing (better than drafts)
• Financing Choice: Why should we facilitate abortions but not facilitate the active (and unasked for) killing of people in vegetative states?
• My Daughter the Whino
• I Know a Chicken, VIctor Vito, Monster Boogie, Elvira, Gold Digger

The first is a site I want to mention in connection with a post I want to write about Harper’s Magazine generally and about the March cover story in particular ("The Case for Impeachment"). The second is a reminder that I wanted to write this very entry. The third is an ethical question I want to remember to spend some time ruminating on and to blog about. The fourth and fifth are little things from my daughter’s life that I want to blog about (my daughter is not a whino; please don’t call child protective services). These last two are the most important to me. My daughter does new things every day, and I’ve neglected to blog so many neat things she’s done and milestones she’s reached that perhaps you should call child protective services after all. Now that I can add notes to the shelf, I’m less likely to forget to blog these things, though. I just add a quick note and have them for later compilation and use. More often than not, what’s happened lately is that I’ve begun adding an item to the shelf to blog later but have gone ahead and blogged it anyway. So the shelf not only provides a repository for things to blog, but the fact that it’s so convenient to use and that I even bother to open it up and add notes in fact compels me to go ahead and blog short entries on the spot while I’m at it.

In short, Flock has helped me to salvage and record some threads from my daughter’s childhood that might otherwise have gone unremembered. How’s that for an endorsement? If part of Flock’s mission is to facilitate better use of the read/write web (I think we’ve said as much before), then, in my case, mission accomplished, if in an unexpected way.

Of course, it happens that Flock has a drafts topbar whose purpose lines up more or less with what I’m using the shelf for, and I’ve wondered why I haven’t been inclined to use that topbar rather than the shelf. I can think of a few reasons. One is that I wrote the first draft of the shelf and so maybe am biased in its favor, however different a beast it is now than when I wrote it. Another is that the shelf provides time-stamping, though I don’t think that’s the draw for me, as I don’t know that I really look at the timestamps when I use it. Yet another is that to use the drafts topbar, I have to open a whole new tab complete with all the editor UI if I want to create or view a draft, and that just feels intrusive and feels like overkill for typing a quick telegraphic idea about something to write about later. And then there’s the fact that using the shelf feels like less of a commitment to me. I’m just taking notes and not committing to staring at a blank page, filled with dread at the probability that I’ll fail to express clearly the precise impishness and delightfulness of my daughter that the thing I want to write about captures. If I’m just taking notes, what I write doesn’t have to aspire to perfection, so it’s less intimidating, and I’m (it’s been proven) more likely to write things down.

There are other things I find useful about Flock, of course (tagging of links on a web service, the history search [more and more, though it's not something I use naturally, never having used that search box very much previously], and collections foremost among them), but the shelf has been the big plus for me. Add a keyboard shortcut that lets me toggle between the shelf and the last thing filling that top real estate and I’d be a very happy camper indeed.

technorati tags: flock