We are hard at work on the next update to Democracy Player, version 0.9.1. There are several important changes on the way.
The first one worth mentioning is speed and responsiveness. I think Democracy Player is a rather quick application already, especially considering all the different functions it brings together, but there’s definitely places I would like to see it improve.
Democracy 0.9.1 will be dramatically speeding up the time it takes to switch between your channels, which is one of the most common functions people do. With these changes, switching between channels will be almost instantaneous on most systems. I’ve tried some of the developer versions that are in progress and they are very snappy.
A second area where we’re making improvements is memory usage. Recent versions of Democracy definitely scoop up a big chunk of RAM. We’ve been holding off on tackling that issue until now because we wanted to wait until we had a more complete feature set built. With the release of 0.9, we’re ready to start the shrinking. Chris has already checked in a change that should reduce usage substantially (no hard numbers yet). He and Nassar have plans for further reductions. These might not all happen in 0.9.1, but you should see steady progress as we move towards 1.0.
Generally, we aim to put out new versions every 4-6 weeks, and we seem to be on track for this release (we’re about 2 weeks into our cycle right now). I’ll have another update soon about user interface improvements that we’re making in this version.
