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Poll Everywhere was built using Macs (those are our development teams’ laptops), yet our Mac integration has left a lot to be desired. That is until today:

Say hello to the all-new Poll Everywhere Mac Presenter application for Mac OS X.

Now Poll Everywhere is a first class citizen on the Mac platform. Here’s an example of a real-time free-text response poll right in the middle of an Apple Keynote presentation. Beautiful, isn’t it? Your audience will feel like it’s right inside of your presentation.

You can now do this for any poll and easily switch between other poll questions as you progress through your presentation. When you first run the application you’ll see:

When you display a poll on-screen and hover your mouse over the window, you’ll see the same control panel on top of the real-time poll:

Finally, when you move your mouse outside the window area, you’ll see just the chart alone, making for perfect seamlessness on top of existing presentations during their slideshows, like in Apple Keynote or PowerPoint for Mac:

And that’s just the start. Go ahead and download the app at http://www.polleverywhere.com/macpresenter to get polling. Be sure to check out the Help menu for things like Keyboard shortcuts and other tips and tricks you can do while using this during a presentation or in another application.

What about the old Mac stuff?

Up to now, you have had three choices for displaying real-time polls on a Mac (a few of which we’ll be phasing out):

1. The Mac Deskbar will be phased out June 30, 2011 – This app has been around for awhile now and worked reasonably well but it had a number of problems and quirks for many of our users and had its share of limitations as well. It’s not good enough for us if something works 90% of the time, so we’ll be phasing this out.

2. Mac Slides will be phased out June 30, 2011 – Our downloadable Mac Slides approach to Mac integration was like the Ford Model T: It came in any color as long as it was black. Mac Slides also didn’t support free-text polls, didn’t have the same kinds of customization that you were used to with the Flash counterparts on our site, and it only worked on very specific vesions of Mac OS, Keynote, and PowerPoint. We’ll be abandoning this approach and open sourcing bits and pieces of this because we think the technology could be useful for some of our customers who have more demanding visualization requirements.

3. Displaying polls full-screen from your web browser will always work – Using the Fullscreen function from a web browser has always been quick and easy to display beautiful, real-time charts in front of any audience. Doing it this way is not ideal for every situation though. For example, if you’re in the middle of a PowerPoint or Keynote slideshow, this requires using ⌘-Tab to get over to your browser and then using the mouse to click a few things to get it going. This isn’t the most professional-looking but it works and is simple. You can keep doing this today even with our new release for Mac users we’re featuring in this update.

We think getting rid of our old Mac solutions that only worked 90% of the time is the best way for us to move forward and focus on something that works for all of our Mac users 100% of the time. What are you waiting for? Get started with the Poll Everywhere Mac Presenter.