Working on Rendering

Dave's redistricting app makes prettier maps than mine. Between Dave and I we now have competition in the independent redistricting application market. I must close the rendering gap!

I figure if I add county outlines, metropolitan area highlights, and maybe interstate highways I'll have enough landmarks for people to understand their states by. Oh, and I need to render water right too.

Here are county outlines:

Here are the "places" known to the census in the current TIGER/Shapefile:

These are all additions to the new Java renderer that parses the shapefiles. I think I'm leaning towards making a downloadable desktop Java application for doing hand-redistricting. It might also be doable as Applet or web-start delivery.