Sunday, May 3, 2009

This is not sheeps Flock!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

About Flock:
Flock web browser is a social web browser, built on the open source codebase of Mozilla Firefox. This browser features tabbed browsing, social networking and a Web 2.0 featured interface. This free social browser supports all the major platforms including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Features and plus points:
Social networking is the most promising feature of Flock. While browsing through Flock, you can open your webmail accounts, connect to your friends on different social networks and access the news feed of your choice. It supports all the major social networks - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Digg and Flickr. All social networking services are managed through the “People Sidebar,” “Webmail” and “Feeds Sidebar” buttons, which open their relevant service options in a vertical sidebar on the left side of browser without interrupting the main browser window.
With the “Open Media Bar” feature, Flock gives its users a rich and interactive media experience. It is the first browser that supports media RSS, which allows users to use photos and videos like regular RSS blog posts. When a user clicks the “Open Media Bar” button, it opens a horizontal bar on the top of the browser to preview and view different online photos and videos from popular photo/video sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr.
Social bookmarking and blogging is another handy feature of Flock. It offers a separate blog writing and editing tool where one can write and publish posts to all major blogs like WordPress, Blogger, Blogsome and Typepad. For bookmarking, it offers different services called breadcrumbs (pages and tags bookmarked by users), Watchlist (users are able to monitor other users’ bookmarks) and Groups (defined groups of Flockers linking to this category).

Evolution of Web Detection:
Core to the Flock experience is the tight integration flocks provide with various online services — including social, media, blog and bookmarking services as mentioned above.
Many of these services have APIs that flock call in order to perform certain tasks, but there are some things flock must do without API support… some tasks that require them to examine the actual HTML content of the pages the user is loading up and look for certain patterns. So flock need to be able to detect when a user logs in to (or out of) a supported service, for example, since some integration features will only work when the user is logged-in. They also need to detect when there are “media streams” available from a given page so that they can allow the user to open them in the media bar.
How do they know if a user is logged in to Service X? Well generally speaking, if you’re logged in to a service then there’s a button or link on the page to allow you to log out. Spotting that button or link is a great clue for the browser to know you’re logged in. If lucky, the button has an id that makes it especially easy to spot, for instance: id=”logoutButton”
But the thing about web services is that they’re likely to change their HTML at some point. Since that “logoutButton” isn’t part of a published API, there’s nothing to stop Service X from changing it to a link, and perhaps dropping the id attribute. This is a problem for Flock, since it would break the integration. Flock would no longer be able to detect that the user had logged in to the service, and some Flock functionality would be broken or disabled as a result.
To combat this problem, Flock have developed a technology called Web Detective. Web Detective lets us specify detection “rules” in an updateable XML file for each service. So if ServiceX ever changes their HTML and breaks Flock’s integration, they can just update the serviceX.xml file and within a few hours Flock users will be running with the new rules and all will be good with the world again.
Flock Web Detective:
So Flock's Web Detective service is designed to make detection of states or information on web pages easier. It is used to detect logged-in or logged-out states for various web services, to detect media streams or person information on web pages, etc.
With Web Detective, it's possible to examine any combination of URL, Document source, DOM, Form fields and Cookies using string comparison, regular expressions and even XPath expressions. Web Detective also lets you specify special named strings, such as web service URLs that may be subject to change, in a format that makes them easy to update later.
Detection rules and named strings are defined in updateable XML files.

2 comments:

Omar Saabith said...

So back in action!!!!!!!

Ajith said...

Not much..But u can look for more technical articles,I think so...