Benjamin Higginbotham with TechnologyEvangelist.com.
With me, I've got Nicholas once again, from a Participatory Culture Foundation.
Those are the guys who make "Democracy Player".
-Nicholas, welcome! -Hi, how are ya?
Doing great, how about yourself?
Brilliant, thanks.
So, you guys are on the cusp of releasing Democracy Player 0.9.5,
it just kinda rolls right off the tongue.
Tell us a bit about this new release.
Yeah, this is a big update for us,
it's the biggest update you'll see before our 1.0 comes out.
We have a lot of important stuff in here, a lot of it's behind the scenes,
but some of the stuff you'll notice is a redesigned interface,
it's smoother and simpler and slicker.
We have some nice things like the MAC users,
it will generate thumbnails automatically.
If you want to download a video and don't have that yet for Windows or Linux,
that's something that we're definitely working on.
There's proxy support, better BitTorrent support.
It does a better job resuming downloads if something gets interrupted.
And all in all, I just think it's a smoother and cleaner experience,
and it's a big step towards the update coming out.
You know, one thing I noticed is that as each build keeps getting released,
the system seems to use less and less RAM, and get faster and faster and faster
in its ability to playback files and download files.
'Cause I remember working with the beta, I think it was 0.8 or something like that,
and it was a pretty big RAM hog.
How are you coming on with the optimisation of Democracy at this point?
That's definitely a big focus for us as you know with the past few versions
we've done a lot to reduce the number use, improve the speed and that's
going to be something that we continue to work on.
It's not clear right now whether we will be doing some big changes before
or after 1.0, but, you know, over the next 6 months we're going to continue to see
much better performance, but using less resources, feeling faster more responsive.
So, we have to see that as important.
You mentioned that this is one, at least I believe you mentioned, that this is
one of the final releases before 1.0, or at very least, before your road to 1.0.
What do we have left to get to 1.0? What can we expect in 1.0?
The big thing that you'll see in 1.0 is stability and we'll be doing a lot of
bug fixing, trying to nail down some of the last final bugs that we haven't been
able to fix so far. The biggest challenge on our end for that is just being able to
reproduce the bugs; finding a system where we can see it happen because there
are so many different kinds of setups out there that a bug may only happen in
those specific circumstances, and that makes it hard for us to track it down
and fix it. Once we see it happening, you know, we can always fix it, and so
stability, fixing bugs is definitely the biggest priority.
There's also just a few finishing touches - we wanna make easier for
people to use remote controls with Democracy Player if they have something
like that. I have a few more ways that people can customise and interact with it,
so it's mostly gonna be cleanup around the edges, but I think it'll feel
a more complete experience.
One of the biggest things that's about to happen is we're going to be renaming
Democracy Player and we've found a lot of people get confused by the name and
when they first hear about it they think that it only has content related to
politics on it, which is definitely not the case and not what we intended with
the name, so we feel like it's important for us to find a new name. We have one
that we think is gonna work, we're just going through some legal stuff and we're
obviously getting a new icon and website design so as part of that
1.0 process we're gonna be launching a new name, new style for the player and
that's gonna be big too.
But the final thing, and what I think is the weakest part of the Democracy Player
experience is the channel guide; we're rewriting that from scratch.
The version you see now is based on some existing software that is out there and
doesn't exactly