Dave's Redistricting App

[davebradlee]

Hi Everyone,

I'm the author of the redistricting app. Not long ago I ran across all of your posts here on the app and I wanted to say "Thanks" and let you know what's going on with the app. I've posted diaries about the app on SwingStateProject.com over the last 1.5 years if you want to look at some of the history.

Until now, the app has been an avocation. I had a good chunk of time between jobs in the winter of 2008-09 when I got started on this, but since May 2009 I've had a "real" job...until now. I'm taking the plunge and working on the app full time for at least the first 1/2 of this year. I've been talking to a bunch of people and am trying to get some funding for it. At the moment it looks good, but not yet a done deal.

I plan to get all the new 2010 census data when it's available (Feb-Mar). The partisan data story is still unknown. Getting the data at the right granularity and format is a pain. For the states that have it now it's a few other people who have made that possible.

Version 2.0.4 is up there now. I can see many of you have used 2.0.x. I've created a survey that is open until next Monday night, January 17th (at 11:59pm PST). To take the survey paste www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=HBNLOI_a50d3df in your browser (without the blanks -- since I'm a newbie the Blog won't accept me putting a link in there.) The survey will help give me some direction in my work over the next few months.


I bought a Mac and have been debugging the app there and so hope to have some improvements for you Mac users (boy -- the MacBook is really nice :-))

Anyway, please fill out the survey if you feel inclined. I will now try to check in here periodically to hear your thoughts and let you know when I'm making upgrades.

Thanks!

Dave

[davebradlee]

I've uploaded DRA Version 2.2.4, which has a new feature for California, which allows you to work with a subset of the state at a time. Because California is so large, even on a fast machine panning and zooming can be pretty slow. By working with a subset those operations are noticably faster. (And it's not the old feature where it automatically puts a bunch of districts around the center of the screen! :-))

Also, I uploaded Block Groups for California. These were much needed because some voting districts had more than 100,000 people in them -- way too big to reasonably work with.

The new feature for California only, and only using 2010 vote districts or block groups, lets you select between a predefined set of overlapping regions. There's a box in the lower right. This is the way you select regions of the state. For example, if Central is selected, block groups (or voting districts in the center of the state are shown, but if you were to pan up north, block groups for the northern counties would not be shown.

Other new features:
-- additional check boxes under Tools have been moved to More Options and the new features are found there.
-- You can toggle Color By Election between Presidential and Average.
-- You can turn off showing vote district and block group tool tips.

I also fixed a bug where if you saved a DRF using non-US regional settings (comma and period flipped for numbers) you could not load it. That should work now, but will have to be loaded using the save settings as when you saved.

Enjoy.

Dave's Redistricting is a project of ProgressiveCongress.org. You can support the project with a tax-deductible contribution thru the link on the app. Thanks.