Why Get Swirls?
- Swirls can be used in a festival hall to run tips *without* computer operators! If you provide two rfid readers (about $16 each), let dancers use one and the caller(s) use the other, then dancers can simply "swipe"
their cards over the reader to put themselves into/out-of the dance.
They need to pick up the kind of card that best suits them: a couples card or one of several types of singles cards (M F E, where M=dances male part, F=dances female part, E=dances either part). The callers get a "command card" which toggles Swirls between the Present display (who's
present?) and the Squares display (ie. generates a new set of square assignments).
- Swirls will optionally keep statistics (how many dancers were in each tip, what types of dancers (C M F E), plus a timestamp). It seems that festivals/conventions/etc often want to know their hall utilization.
- As you can tell from the above, Swirls supports handling singles. In addition to the singles types mentioned above, there are two more: MF and FM. MF means one who prefers to dance M but is willing to dance F as needed, and vice versa for FM. I haven't made cards for them but I generally provide some "command cards" which can switch a card to MF or FM.
- Life being what it is, Swirls cannot always match singles up with other compatible singles. Swirls supports two methods to handle this:
- Singles that Swirls couldn't match are matched with "(ask)" which means that they need to raise their hand or otherwise go around the hall's periphery to ask for an "out" dancer to participate.
- Alternatively, Swirls will go ahead and pull someone on its own as a match from the outdancers. Your choice as indicated via the Setup display.
- Swirls is fast! On my home desktop it will match 500 couples in 2 seconds. On my 10-15 year old laptop it'll match 500 couples in 3 seconds. On Wasca's ancient laptops Swirls will match 500 couples in 10 seconds.
- Swirls will select a fontsize and grid parameters automatically (although you can fool with it using +- and jJ hotkeys). When a huge number of dancers is involved, such as my 500 couples examples above, Swirls will use auto-scrolling of the display (slowly scrolling up and down) to display square assignments to the dancers.
- Well, perhaps "no operators" is a bit too far -- one does need to start swirls, load it with the right club file, and optionally and occasionally reset it (which I did for Wasca at noon, dinner time, and evening).
- Dancers have program levels that they've achieved (Basic SSD ... DBD A1 A2 C1 ... C4). The club also has a "current" program level that is being danced. One can change the club level with "l" and "L" hotkeys. Dancers may be available (ie. present in the hall) but will automatically not be included in a dance if its program level is too high for them. Lowering the club level will automatically include them in the next squares roll-up.
- Swirls is run by hotkey (r = roll up squares, p= present display, e=edit display, etc). The most important hotkey to remember is "m" (for menu). This will bring up a menu of actions one can take; its an active menu, so clicking on one of the menu's buttons will perform the associated action. Hovering the mouse over a button will give a bit of help for that button, too. Pressing "m" a second time will make the menu go away.
Its been used at Pennsylvania's Fabulous Fall Festival (in their ADV hall), at Wasca (DBD, Adv, C1), and at MDSDF's Star Spangled Banner festival (DBD, Adv, C1).