The Awards poll for 2019 has been under way for about a month, and has so far received ninety form submissions – although that does include a number of blank entries1.
As usual, each category in the poll features up to six nominations from which you can choose, along with the option to nominate something else. I took a look at those alternative suggestions a couple of weeks ago, detailing them in the RISCOSitory twitter feed, so now it’s time to re-visit that list and publish it here on RISCOSitory itself, along with any that have appeared since.
In the best commercial software category, alternative suggestions are RiscOSM from Sine Nomine, Messenger Pro from R-Comp, VirtualRiscPC from VirtualAcorn, LanMan98 from Warm Silence Software, and Organizer from North One Communications.
For best non-commercial software, the alternative suggestions are NetSurf from the NetSurf developers, NetFetch from R-Comp (which is actually a commercial package, so may have been typed into the wrong box in error – unless it was intended to be another vote for NetSurf), and RPCEmu from Matthew and Peter Howkins.
For best game or diversion, R Fred Williams’ classic game Pushy II has been suggested.
In the best hardware category, the unsurprising alternative suggestion is the Raspberry Pi 4.
For best website or online resource, the VirtualRiscPC in Use (including supplements) PDF books – available from the VirtualAcorn website – have been suggested. (I personally would treat this as an offline resource because being a PDF publication, it can be downloaded for reading offline later).
In the broken cog category, R-Comp’s !Store has been offered as an alternative option for not showing its content on the website, along with 3QD for ‘squatting on riscos.com when ROOL could use it’.
And finally, in the best overall contributor category – for which there are no nominations to start you off, and all votes come from what is typed into the text field – the suggestions are Jeffrey Lee, RISC OS Developments, Adrian Lees, Andrew Rawnsley, Michael Grunditz, Rob Sprowson, L Noar, Stuart Swales, and Matthew and Hilary Phillips of Sine Nomine.
If you haven’t yet voted, why not think about spending a little time looking at the options and doing so now? If you wanted to consider the alternative suggestions first, you now have a selection to choose from!
- The blank entries – which arrive as a completed form (including the survey part) but without any entries selected (or alternative options filled in) – are almost certainly an indication that somebody (or some bot), somewhere is trying to test the form to see if it can be used to relay spam. There may be a few in addition to these, but the most common example appears daily between 13:45 and 14:00 (with the exception of 28th March, when it was 12:51 – the day before British Summer Time bagan in the UK), and always from an IP address with a consistent first two parts. There have been no valid votes from any IP address that starts the same way, so they will be easily filtered out when the time comes to count the votes – and you can easily work out how many such votes there are; simply count the days since the poll went live!