A number of OS X users are running into the dreaded “DBRunRecoveryError” bug that prevents Democracy from starting up. We’re offering a $200 bounty to anyone who can provide instructions to reproduce it or $500 for a complete fix.
Details Can be found here.

Each time we release a new version of Democracy Player, there’s an interesting pattern of Mac and Windows downloads. Last month, we had about 17,000 mac downloads. In the same month, we had about 102,000 windows downloads. That indicates that we have a higher proportion of mac users than the general population, but still many more windows users. A higher proportion of mac users doesn’t surprise me– lots of us around here use macs, including myself, and we’ve made more of an effort than most cross-platform projects to create a great mac app. In addition, I think mac users are more likely to be early adopters of new types of software.

So we have higher proportion of mac users– no big deal. But here’s what I didn’t expect. While our overall ratio of Window to Mac users is about 6 to 1, Mac users are much much more likely to download the app in the first few days of the release. Since we released 0.9.2 about 20 hours ago, we’ve had 6,169 mac downloads and 7,556 windows downloads. In the first day of a release, we have almost as many mac downloads as windows downloads. And we see that with every release. After a few days the numbers will start tilting way over to the windows side.

To me, this suggests that Mac users are much more connected to Mac news than Windows users are to Windows news. When something happens– like a new version of an app– news spreads very quickly in the Mac community. I guess I would have expected Mac users to be somewhat more news-focused, but not quite to this degree.

Hello, team Mac!

We are looking to hire another world-class programmer for our small, awesome team. Check the jobs page and be in touch.

We’ve just released Democracy Player 0.9.2. This version makes some big improvements in speed and memory use. You’ll notice the improvements immediately:

Download Democracy Player 0.9.2

On Windows, the app uses 50-75% less RAM than previous versions. Pretty good progress on that front. Switching between channels is much faster now as well. There are lots of bug fixes in this version too.

Basically, this is the “If you like Democracy Player, but have had problems, try this version.” version. Tell us what you think!

I’ve also made some updates to the front page of the website over the last week. It’s simpler and, I hope, clearer.