As something of a political junkie, I've always wanted to be able to make detailed maps of election results. These days, it's pretty easy to get county-level election maps for most statewide contests--but not all contests are statewide, and a county is a pretty big chunk of land, and usually not as homogenous as the county maps make them look. What I've always wanted to do was to take the basic precinct-level voting data that counties release, and turn it into a map.

I have had a few questions lately about the quality of our imagery and maps. There is some confusion on how Depiction handles maps and imagery, actually. When you select a map or image source in the Quickstart Data list, you are getting a static image at the zoom level of your depiction area. If you're using 1.01.n, they will be put into Revealers and you will still be able to see the active map or image source you've selected for your background in the lower left corner of the Depiction screen.

Our recent video, “Howard Hanson Dam & the Green River: Depicting the Flood Risk," has become the most popular Howard Hanson Dam-related video on YouTube, with nearly 2,000 views. This shows the value of Depiction in communicating potential emergencies to the public, but it also shows that the public has a real interest in clear, visually communicated information about this particular situation.

Yesterday's webinar "Depicting Your Disaster: Helping Communities and Businesses Prepare" had over 200 attendees! Captain Buike did a great job of showing the various ways Depiction can be used by governments, businesses and other organizations to prepare for disasters. If you missed it, you can watch the video here.

A new version of Depiction is available for purchase or trial download--1.01.l. The new release makes Depiction even more powerful and easy to use, with new data sources, better shape editing tools and a significantly enhanced ability to deal with files with many data points. If you own a copy of Depiction, you can run the updater right now to get this new version.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II, with Germany's invasion of Poland. (Brings a whole new meaning to National Preparedness Month, huh?)

Today is the beginning of National Preparedness Month, and Depiction is proud to be a member of the National Preparedness Month coalition. We have some very cool things coming down the pipeline in the coming weeks, but for the moment, I wanted to take a moment and go over the three basic steps for preparedness, as described at Ready.gov--along with some thoughts on how Depiction might be useful.

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In my recent post about mapping land parcels for the fire department, I mentioned I changed some existing icons, but I didn’t go into much detail about how I did it. I started by finding free icons on the Internet through a Google search. Next, my quandary was what format they need to be in and what size. 

Jeff Thurston at the Vector One blog downloaded Depiction last night and tried it out--you can read his review here. It's a great overview of some of the things Depiction can do. Here's the key paragraph: