And an updated list of alternative votes.
The Awards poll for 2019 went live towards the end of March, with a deadline for votes pencilled in as the end of May. However, due to the disappointing number of votes received, I have decided to leave it open until the end of this month.
If you have yet to vote, please do not forget to do so. While there are no physical awards, and no direct financial reward for those who are either nominated, receive votes, or win in a given category, casting a vote is a nice way to acknowledge the work done by developers, publishers, and everyone else involved in bringing RISC OS itself, hardware, software, and publications to you.
And with the revised deadline, it would be sensible bring you up to date with the list of alternative suggestions that have been received in each category. To recap on the process, each category in the poll features up to six nominations from which you can choose, along with the option to nominate something else. i.e. if you don’t want to choose one of the existing options, you can give your vote to absolutely anything else. Those received are usually detailed on the RISCOSitory Twitter feed mid-way through the voting period, and then repeated a week or so later in a post on the site itself, to highlight those alternative suggestions to others who may not yet have voted, in case they wish to vote the same way.
Here, then, is the updated list:
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). James Hobson’s YouTube tutorials have also now been suggested.
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 new suggestions are “RISC OS Direct for forking the OS again”, and duplication of effort on USB, Select, and Direct.
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. The late Jim Nagel has now been added to the list, as has Mark Stephens for his work on the Iconbar website.
Plainly, there have been a few more alternative suggestions, though not many. Sadly, this is reflective on the number of valid votes received since I posted the original version of this list – while the rate of bogus entries has increased1.
So once again, 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 an even a slightly bigger selection to choose from!
!ReadMe
- I previously commented that the bogus entries, which take the form of a completed form (including the survey part) but without any entries selected (or alternative options filled in) – effectively blank votes – are probably a bot of some kind testing the form to see if it can be used as a spam relay. Most notably, I spotted an obvious pattern with the majority of them being from IP addresses in a particular range, and all (but one) of these being submitted between 1:45pm and 2:00pm. The one exception was an hour different the day before the UK’s clocks changed. Interestingly, there was one outside that time block and from a different IP range – and that appears to have been the first attempt, with quite a few from that same IP range since, but without an obvious pattern in the timing or frequency (but still easy to filter out when the time comes).