Performancing for FirefoxFlock

Thanks to David Dunn and his Flockd (and bigger thanks to Performancing LLC for a sane implimentation) I am writing this post from Performancing in a Flock developers’ continuous build from today. These are fantastic exciting times! I am very impressed with Performancing, and excited to play with it, partly to look for ways to improve Flock’s blog editor, and the rest of Flock’s experience.

My biggest gripe with it so far is its name. “Performancing” follows the fine tradition of extensions like the wonderful FlashGot in having a name that not only does not tell what it is, but makes me think it is something else such as Faster Fox.

Bugs I see in Performancing:

• Discoverability of performancing. Right click was about the 3rd place I looked.
• I saw WordPress.com in the list of Blog types, and made the mistake of trying to configure for my own site. Poor error message, and let me continue adding that account.
• Next button is always available during setup.
• I clicked Notes -> “Example Note 1″ and overwrote my blog post! Destructive operations are bad.
• Not being able to highlight and copy text in “Settings” and “About”. This is a pet peeve of mine.
• The “title” field font is too small

Other comments about Performancing:

• Split Panes make me feel uneasy that I am going to lose the content.
• Split Pane affects the experience of all the other tabs in the window.

Questions about Performancing:

• How to Save as Draft?
• Different between Rich (normal) Editing and Live Preview?
• I notice that you include some of Deepestsender licenced code, is it GPL? What version? Previously, I was not able to get an answer to that, when I had wanted to look at the code. I just downloaded deepestsender-0.7.0 and still do not see a license file.

Consideration for Flock

• Using Midas or TinyMCE within Flock makes a lot of sense for a consistent experience for users. Particularly if Composer ala Nvu becomes more specialized for smart web editing. “Gerv: my improvements to the core editor will certainly not be helpful to Flock. They’re so related to web page authoring – and not article authoring for a blog – that they’re out of scope here” Daniel Glazman
• High contrast on the editor buttons?
• A quote button?
• Maybe an image URL button
• Edit text Color?

Notes:

• The credits include “Special thanks goes to “Anthony Young from Flock” for writing the Atom API implementation…”