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:
I actually love the split pane thing and wish we’d do something similar in Flock. In any case, I’m dying to have the blog editor back in a tab rather than in a new window The split pane is the best of both worlds for me because I can continue to look at what I’m blogging about without having to toggle tabs or juggle windows. Performancing gets beaucoup points from me for its general UI and smoothness. That’s not to say that there aren’t UI problems. If either Flock or Performancing would improve the tag story (which would require working with service providers to encourage them to use real tags), I’d be much happier. For the moment, Performancing feels generally smoother to me and more pleasing to use than Flock’s blog editor.
Very insightful comments Daryl.
Any other applications in a similar style that you have found do the split pane well?
For my style split pane is very awkward. I like to see the whole post. Vertical space tends to be at a premium, where as horizontal is not — particularly with wider screens. This is also why I find the topbar awkward at times.
“Performancing gets beaucoup points from me for its general UI and smoothness.”
I think a big part of this is the use of Midas.
The tag story definitely needs improvement. I see Ultimate Tag Warrior style integration in Flock’s future
“Performancing feels generally smoother to me and more pleasing to use than Flock’s blog editor.” I would love to hear specific aspects that contribute to this general feeling!
Luis Suarez in a post titled “Weblogging Directly from FireFox – Performancing for FireFox – Part Deux” (link) presents five things he likes and what needs improving in Performancing. Every point is well made, though I am still interested in how Rich (normal) Editing and Live Preview are different.
The notes thing confused me, and I could not figure out how to save quotes from web pages as notes. Now, I see this save as “note” option, but I think of drafts and notes as very different things. This is why Flock’s shelfs is so useful for me, and why an integrated experience will be even more compelling as Flock develops.
In regards to Luis’s comment about no spell checking, Asa writes “The latest development build of SpellBound integrates seamlessly with this blogging tool.” Flock needs to get spell checking available to all form fields! (bug)
Pingback/trackback in the client is something that we have considered for Flock, but many blogging platform do it themselves.
Thanks a lot, Lloyd, for the feedback comments and for the linkback. Regarding your comments on
I think you make a good point. I think though it would an interesting option to have this Live Preview option as it would allow you to see exactly how the weblog post would actually look like. Only thing that I am not sure I agree with is the fact that it does not show the hyperlinks as it should. Qumana, despite the fact that it is also an WYSIWYG weblogging editor, has got this preview option where it does a very clean job on how the weblog post should look like. However, I do agree with you about the fact that if that feature would be left out I would think there wouldn’t be too much of an impact.
Although I haven’t tried out the latest developments from the weblogging component from Flock, I must say that I find this Notes feature very handy. I know that drafts and notes would be different but if I take the example from other weblogging tools you have got lots of restrictions when creating the drafts whereas with this Notes option you can have many of them storing those different weblog posts you may be working on. And just grabbing their content is just a single click away. I find that is a very powerful feature, specially for advanced webloggers. I will let you know of my experience when I try the latest build from Flock though and see how it actually feels like.
Regarding your comments about SpellBound your link to Asa does not seem to be active, at least, it is not working with me, but I have installed the extension as well and will have a look and see how it actually goes. Thanks for the tip, though. I hope it works out the way I expect it to.
From this comment above I take you guys are not planning into incorporating Pingback/Trackback. If that is the case I would suggest you revisit it again as that is one of the key fundamental features that allows webloggers to not behave like islands in a huge ocean but as a complex network of islands linked to one another and with a connection by enabling conversations to take place. If that feature is not put together for Flock I would think that not many webloggers would take it into account, specially since quite a few webloggers are relying on them to get themselves a space in the Blogosphere. Anyway, thanks again for the feedback and look forward to trying out the latest build from Flock.
Hummm, Lloyd, it looks like things have not started very well with the latest build from Flock that I have picked up from here: http://tinderbox.flock.com/. I have grabbed the latest build from the 23rd of December and after I have installed it over the previous 0.4.10 and I get to start it up most of the clickable options do not seem to be responding. So whenever I click on the blogging option nothing happens, I cannot even add / remove more blogging options and click on the hot buttons on the top left of the web browser nothing happens either. I have tried to reinstall and everything and it doesn’t seem to be working very well. Has anybody else noticed the same or am I the only one with this problem. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thanks !
@ Luis the timing of our discussion could not have been worse. Termie has checked in significant code to take the favorites manager much better, but it has temporarily broken most everything. The blogging part being unusable is documented in bug 1895.
I am using builds from the Wednesday, Dec 21 on MacOS and MSWin, and they work well.
Thanks, Lloyd, for the headsup. Indeed, the build from the previous day is working pretty all right. So I will take it for a spin over the next couple of days and then let you know how it all went. Thanks again for letting us know about the recent issues. Hopefully, they will be fixed soon ! Keep up the good work !
Not sure if you have figured this out already but if you right click the performancing icon in the status bar at the bottom, you can get it to open not only in a split pane, but also a new window or tab.