Poll Everywhere Blog

We are very sorry for some recent frustrations our customers have been having when trying to embed Poll Everywhere polls into PowerPoint slides. Customers have reported that after following the instructions for embedding a poll, they see only a blank screen when viewing the slideshow.  The reason for this is due to differing revisions of the Adobe Flash 9 Player. Adobe has released several fixes and revisions since they released the first version of the Adobe Flash 9 player. For polls in Poll Everywhere to display correctly, we now require v9.0.45.0 of the Adobe Flash player to be installed.

Additionally, what is frustrating about this is that versions of the player can be installed independently for Firefox and Internet Explorer. This is because Firefox has its own plug-in formats and Internet Explorer uses ActiveX-based plug-ins. Therefore, if you have the latest version reported in Firefox and are still scratching your head as to why the polls don’t work in PowerPoint, it’s because the ActiveX control is likely not up-to-date. Since PowerPoint relies on the ActiveX version of the Adobe Flash Player, it too must be updated.

If you want to see what version of the Adobe Flash plug-in you are currently using, go here: http://www.mediacollege.com/adobe/flash/player/version/show.html * Note that the version shown is the version installed for the plug-in of the current web browser you are using. Switch over to Internet Explorer to see the version installed for ActiveX.

If you want to update to the latest player from Adobe, go here: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash * Note that the latest version is 9,0,115,0 as of the date/time of this blogpost.

Since we have issues with users viewing polls with outdated revisions of the Adobe Flash player, we have now enforced the version required into our poll. If you do not have the correct version of the plug-in installed, your Flash player will indicate that you need to upgrade. Once you upgrade, you’ll be able to view our polls correctly and, more importantly, be able to embed your polls into PowerPoint again. We hope this solves many of the headaches that some of our customers have been experiencing. We’re very sorry for any of the inconvenience.

If you haven’t noticed, Poll Everywhere has undergone some major changes. First and foremost is the new Poll management interface. While our old interface was working just fine we came to the realization that it would start crumbling when we started adding some of the exciting features that we have planned.

While our new user interface is the star of the show; we added other notable features including:

XML Results

Now you can download your Poll Everywhere results as XML! This allows even tighter integration between your applications and Poll Everywhere. For developers, this means you can now access results through our XML Poll API.

Time Zones

Did you ever wonder why the time stamp of your results didn’t seem quite right? We fixed that problem by adding time zones to Poll Everywhere. If you’re an existing user, you can click on “My Info” and change your time zone to your locale.

User Information Management

Ok, we should have had this from the start but we finally rolled it into Poll Everywhere.

Now you can change your password, email address, time zone, and other user information from the “My Info” tab.

While most of these features are small; we did a tremendous amount of plumbing work that is going to let us roll a lot of your feedback into our product. You will be able to see the fruits of this labor early in 2008.

We thank our early adopters for helping us make Poll Everywhere even better! To show our appreciation we have given 200 free votes to our existing accounts. Keep the feedback coming and Happy New Year!