Dave's Redistricting App Screwed? (UPDATE: New DRA Link, v2.5)

[muon2]

Years ago when I first tried DRA (version 1?) I found problems with its compatibility on Firefox due to Silverlight. Since Silverlight is a Microsoft product I switched to IE for my DRA browser and I haven't had that problem since, including my test this morning. Over the years I have occasionally found other Silverlight apps that run best on IE, but those are rare.

[muon2]

Future of DRA from the source

Currently no future after November 30, 2016.

[muon2]

It has never worked for me on any browser and I have always wanted to try it out

Try Internet Explorer with a small population state like NV, it seems to work most consistently. The size of state you can load sometimes depends on the speed of your internet connection. I find CA notoriously difficult to load and operate except on my most high-speed connections. Moving the opacity to 100% once a state loads also speeds operations.

[muon2]

I still don't get why there is a newer version with less functionality, while version 2.2 still continues to work.

Basically, 2.2 depends upon another piece of software that is no longer being maintained, not even for emergency fixes. So if something causes that to break, 2.2 will be dead with no chance of revival.  2.5 doesn't have that dependency, so it is more robust, but at the cost of less ability. Ideally, we'll eventually get a DRA 3.0 that doesn't use Silverlight at all, but I can understand why that's unlikely to happen until we have 2020 census data to play with.

I'm hoping that DRA 3.0 will use the estimate data before we get to 2020. He did that with 2008 estimate data, so perhaps it can happen with 2018 data, too.

[muon2]

Has anyone had trouble with Maryland recently? Wouldn't load for me on 2.2 or 2.5 yesterday.

I just tried it with 2.2 on IE and it worked fine.

[muon2]

DRA 2.2 still works for me in IE from my Win 10 machine.