After a long radio silence, just wanted to say: I’ve yanked the mozilla editor out of Flock, and replaced the blog text editor with tinyMCE. I’m still working through some initial bugs, but so far the effort looks promising.
Although I hate to turn my back to the mozeditor, tinyMCE simply has a much more active community, and the code that it produces seems more compatible with blogging sites.
so – this is a test of the tinyMCE editor in Flock – 1…2…3.
China is a wonderful place – the food alone makes it fantastic, but the great people push it way over the top.
But, unfortunately for me, I don’t really do vacation – However, I’m making great progress with photo extensibility – shortly I’ll blog a simple techinique to extend Flock to support the photo service of your choice.
Wow – I’m in China! Here’s a picture of the lobby of my hotel:
A picture of me in my hotel. Pretty rare to see me in such nice surroundings:
An unrelated picture of spiderman on my roommate’s tongue.
Relevant news: The windows version of Flickr upload works now – sorry that this was broken before – I forgot to modify an important build file, but all should be rosey now. Also, I have added the preference to resize your images before uploading (the resize algorithm could use some work). You can find this in the Web Services section of preferences. Note that there have been many large code commits lately – apologies for random brokenness.
Here is a screencap of the Flickr Uploader, just FYI.
Thanks to the new Flock Flickr uploader, available only in hourly builds, the world now knows about the “special” relationship that my roommate has with our dog.
I switched the upload mode in our code to asynchronous, which will make uploads faster. But, it may take a bit of time for changes to be reflected online. I also made some UI changes to improve usability a bit (ie. there are better visual cues to indicate what is going on during uploading, and I added a remove button in the image props.) Hopefully, also fixed a theming bug on the mac.
I may throw in the file size preference now – we will see how much fun I feel like having this Friday evening.
The first draft of the Flock Flickr Uploader has just been put into our hourly. There are still some UI kinks, but basic functionality is in there:
There are some things missing, like:
Check it out – or, wait a week for tweaks to work their way in 
I’ve been working hard @ flickr uploading, and now I find myself again awake @ 6AM+. In my delirium, hacked in an osx-like zoominess to the flickr mouse hover states – very cool! So, now scrolleybox=zoomybox a bit as well.
Also, I was able to throw in image rotation and scaling to the upload implementation. So that’s all going quite well.
Tired now – sleep!
After a couple weeks of bugfixing, and evaluating where we are at dev-wise, we threw together a Wiki page that lists out an approximate Flock Roadmap.
We are trying really hard to make some architectural improvements in the short term. For example, we are refactoring our RSS service to improve performace – this should dramatically enhance your feed viewing pleasure.
Beyond that, we are busy improving memory and browsing performance, while also adding extensibility to bookmarks, so that the community can add support for other services in addition to those that ship with Flock.
Lastly, one of our main pet peeves with the Flickr functionality, is that you can’t upload pictures through the photo topbar – very frustrating! So we are re-designing Flickr Topbar to include upload functionality. It’s thus far looking nice and friendly to use – batch uploads, drag-and-drop reordering. Titling and Tagging should also make it in there. Look for that in hourlies towards the end of next week. Oh – and extensibility is on deck for our photo topbar as well.
If you havn’t yet, we recommend checking out our latest build - many improvements to blog editing, and many bugfixes!
Today marks the launch of the flocket. For full coverage check out Charming Bastard’s Weblog.
In the meantime, a bug has been fixing me this weekend – I still have a nasty cold! Amidst a pile of tissues, I’ve been thinking through issues with tags and categories: the same, different? Well, at the very least partially overlapping in function. Anyways, I decided to get decidedly un-theoretical about the whole thing, and I threw in support for movabletype categories, right along side of tags – we’ll see if it makes the cut. Theraflu buzzes are kinda nice.
That is me as #3, Ian on #2, G on #1. OK, on to the next bug.
