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?

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