Nicholas Reville

Democracy Player - Nicholas Reville 9:17 2/13/07 We caught up with Nicholas Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation. They are about to release version 0.9.5 of Democracy Player which will be their last big revision before their release of Democracy 1.0.

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?