Ben was doing such an awesome job on the Linux port of Democracy that we had to hire him. He started full-time a couple days ago, and here’s an update from him: Linux port setup.py update. For more news, join the development email list.
And we’re still looking for another programmer as well…
We are now hiring for a software developer to join the Democracy Player team. We’re looking for a world-class coder who cares about the project and is ready to kick ass. We’d love everyone’s help getting the word out about the job, here’s the official description:
Software Developer - We’re looking for a solid programmer who can work independently, communicate well, and occasionally step back from the code to contemplate improvements to program architecture or our development process. Most of our code is in dynamic languages like Python and Ruby, so a clear understanding of language concepts is important.
If you’re interested, send a casual resume or description of experience to: jobs@pculture.org
And we are still taking applications for art director / graphic designer and web director. Our full jobs page is here: jobs at PCF.
We’ve been discussing some subtle tweaks to improve the ‘interactive’ pieces of the Democracy Player interface. We want to make the email-to-a-friend links more obvious and the bomb-this-video button more obvious– both are a little bit hard to find in the current design. We’ve worked out some tweaks to the layout, but we need some nice new buttons. Inspired by Holmes’ previous post, we thought we’d ask you to help us make them.
Here’s a rough (ugly) sketch of how we want things to go:
–click the picture for a full-size version–
The video that we’ve changed is the one in the ‘unwatched’ section, the other ones are how it looks currently. These might not look like big changes, but they really are– interface is a game of inches, and by inches I mean pixels. So that’s the layout, but we need beautiful, consistent versions of these buttons in order to make it real:
1. a ’send to a friend’ button that will go above the search field (could also say ’send to friend’)
2. bomb and email icons that will go to the left of the blue ‘info area’ on each video (as you can see, we want to put more emphasis on these, but the way they look in the image above is a little too big and garish, so we’re not sure what to do).
3. save and delete buttons that will go in the bottom part of the blue info area.
Want to help? Send us some designs! You can either email them to nicholas-at-pculture.org or post a link in the comments on this entry. Don’t feel bound to the rough sketch above (for instance, the ‘Send to a Friend’ button doesn’t need to be a speech bubble) and, as always, feel free to send ideas for other parts of the interface also.
Keep in mind that we are very, very picky about stuff like this, so don’t feel bad if we don’t use your stuff– every idea helps us see things in a new way and gets us closer to something great. And as Holmes pointed out in that post, if you don’t like the way something looks, you can always change the Democracy Player interface yourself. Someday we might even have a theming system for you.
One of the people who got in touch about Channel Guide moderation, Steven Ansell, had something very cool on his website iconicon.net. He swapped out the default icons in Democracy with some of his own work. He even rolled it up into a “Democracy Makeover kit”.
So it seemed like a good occasion to blog about how easy it is to change Democracy Player’s looks. Not only thumbnails, but also the CSS that determines almost every part of the interface. Here’s how:
On Windows, go to “C:\Program Files\Democracy Player\resources”. On Mac, ctrl-click on the Democracy .app file, “Show Package Contents”, and drill down into the Resources folder. The “css” and “images” folders are where the action is. On Mac you have to restart to see your changes, but on Windows you often don’t–just switch to another view and switch back.
And we’re totally open to suggestions, so if you make something you like, send it our way.
