Regarding Sapling upgrade, it was a necessary step towards faster and less memory-hungry shielded transactions. Before sapling, every shielded transaction used more than 1GB of RAM and it took several minutes to complete. Due to that, creating polls/votings through VoteCoin took long time and lots of resources, since the polls are technically stored on blockchain as a shielded transactions. Now after Sapling, only about 50MB of RAM is needed to create a shielded transaction, and it only takes few seconds to compute. Sapling shielded addresses are now default in VoteCoin (since 2.0.2), it works if you want to send a transaction to somebody else, but polls are still using old pre-sapling mechanism (called sprout) and it is still neither optimal nor fast.
So, our next goal is to switch to Sapling for polls too in VoteCoin as well. But this requires support for exporting of viewing keys from the wallet for sapling addresses, which is not yet supported by VoteCoin. Since VoteCoin is a fork of zcash, we decided to wait for ZCash to implement it, and then we can backport it easily. Anybody in VoteCoin team does not feel comfortable trying to implement this feature on our own at the moment, since making a mistake would have fatal consequences, so it's safer to wait for official support in ZCash.
Regarding portable wallet, the current GUI wallet can be safely used from an USB device on Windows, since it stores data within the wallet directory. However this is not possible on MAC, since MAC stores wallet data on local user's home directory, regardless of where was the wallet application started from.
-Tom
Thank you. So downloaded the Windows wallet so I can get my coins off an exchange. Very nice interface.
Any idea how I can program a vote that distributes the outcome to voters (sort of gambling I guess). I like to create a poll for tomorrows superbowl game in the US it is sort of a big deal here.