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.
See below the fold for more details and screen shots.
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I'll be at Netroots Nation. Would love to meet DRA users.
The new feature for California only, and only using 2010 vote districts or block groups, lets you select between a predifined set of overlapping regions. Take this screen shot, for example.
Notice the box in the lower right. This is the way you select regions of the state. Currently Central is selected, so all of the block groups in view are shown. If you were to pan up north, block groups for the northern counties would not be shown.
In the next image, Bay Area is selected. You can see how the counties of Sonoma, Napa and Solano, for example, do not have their block groups shown. Only Bay Area counties do.
Note: if some block groups or voting districts don't allow themselves to be colored, they probably are already colored. There's a bug I'm trying to track down on this. To remedy this, click Color By Population and then click back and the color should show up.
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. And thanks.