Flock Browser – Flock’s 1.1 Beta Has Arrived! | Flock

That was their update… and that was the push I needed.

I’ve always been a bit favorable to using portable browsers since I’ve been almost constantly traveling between Washington DC and Virginia Beach, VA since 2004.  Mind you, that may not seem like a long time, but when your ‘commute’ is three hours long and you know almost every side-street, alternate path, city, town, empty field, and rest-stop in between, it adds up.

Before I had a reliable laptop (Thanks to the donators who gave me a whopping $15 towards my MBP) I carried around a small gray 64MB USB key.  I’ve since lost the cap, the keychain hook has worn off, and all the paint has come off the sides, but I still use it.

On this key were a few Word documents, some mp3’s and Portable Firefox.  When I first found out about Flock and got excited.  Your bookmarks/favorites were stored online!  This was huge!

I started blogging seriously once I found out how easy Flock made it to be… but it was still tied to my desktop.

The idea behind PocketFlock was born.

At first just given the name Portable Flock (how unimaginative) and was just a Flock install with the directory renamed to firefox, and flock.exe to firefox.exe lazily pasted over John Haller’s launcher.  It went through many fits and spurts.  Lots of bundled extensions, upx packing, and many failed attempts to bring the experience to the Mac platform.

I snuck time here and there from work, and tweaked the theme, learned NSIS, PHP, met many great people, and started the most active development in my life.

I also started a huge controversial thread on the Flockstars Mailing list.

I had many detractors, and many supporters, it got very ugly and left everyone involved with a bad taste in their mouth.  Many of my detractors included people who were at that time on Flock’s payroll, where I was publicly derided on their personal blogs and in the instance of Lloyd Budd tried to deny my existence, deleting PocketFlock, and Flock’d from the Flock Wiki, many forum posts, and Wikipedia (and its easy to tell who it is when they go by the same handle on all these sites).  I would get harrassed on my blog, on other forums, but when reasonably approached was still able to apologize to those who I offended.

Things got overwhelming and I stopped caring.

It was a for a variety of personal reasons too.

Illness, 3 moves (4 if you just count august of 2007), many unsatisfying jobs, more spam than actual comments on outraged-artists, and horrible financial problems led to infrequent and half-assed updates.  Many people asked me if I had given up, if PocketFlock was dead, and I replied much later that that wasn’t the case, but I really didn’t act like it.

When Flock went from 0.7-0.9 there were many issues that were quite frankly security issues for people in a portable environment.  I tried to get back into things by submitting a buzilla entry and having a dialog with the Flock devs.  While they promised that there might be a fix in the future, they quickly closed the bug and only offered me the solution to compile my own binaries with modified source (to their credit they did tell me what to change and how to do it, but I didn’t have the resources to do it).  Again there was some hostilities towards me, but I tried to shrug it off.

Flock 1.1 got me excited again… I had switched from Flickr to Picasa, and had been asking for email support since Flock 0.4.x.  Most of the old staff was gone, and I felt like things were finally behind me.  Now, I’m still stretched for time, but I’m excited again and want to get back to being busy.

That brings us to today, I’m on a new domain, with a new blog, and a fresh start.
PocketFlock now supports 2 platforms, has a new source code under development, that might allow it to support Linux x86 and Vista.

I’m back, PocketFlock is back, and I want to get everyone excited again.

Tags: flock, pocketflock