Open for approximately three months, the 2020 RISC OS Awards poll covering 2020 ran from April until June of this year, and received 141 valid votes. The results were calculated a little later than planned, but making a change from the normal approach of publishing them on Twitter and then the Awards website, this time around they were presented live at the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) meeting on 16th August.
Those results can now be found on the Awards website – presented in a similar, but ever so slightly different format this year.
Until now, the results page has listed the primary nominations, and the result – with the primary nominations being those that are listed and selectable on the voting form. These come from first reviewing the year’s news (actually fourteen months) as posted on RISCOSitory up to December and detailing them on the RISC OS Open forum. The ensuing discussion then leads to changes being made to the list, before it is eventually finalised and becomes the voting form.
The voting form itself allows people to vote for any of the primary nominations by selecting them – but also to vote for something else entirely by choosing the ‘alternative option’ and entering what they are voting for in the accompanying text field. These are the ‘secondary nominations’ – and these, too, are now listed on the results page.
Another change this year is that as well as the winners being able to display the appropriate rosette on their website and/or other material, two new rosettes have been added – one for use in a similar way by nominees, and one for use by specified runners up.
To see the full list of nominations and results, pop on over to the 2020 results page – but if you just want to know who the winners are, see below.
- Best commercial software – RiscOSM, from Sine Nomine.
- Best non-commercial software – DplngScan, from Chris Johnson.
- Best game or diversion – The port of ScummVM to RISC OS, by Cameron Cawley.
- Best internet or network connectivity tool – NetSurf, by the NetSurf developers.
- Best development tool – Python, the latest version ported to RISC OS by Chris Johns.
- Best hardware – the Raspberry Pi 400, from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
- Best solution for backwards compatibility – RPCEmu, from Matthew and Peter Howkins.
- Best new development – RISC OS 5.28, with Pi 4 support, from RISC OS Open Ltd.
- Best show of initiative – the anonymous developer working on the new TCP/IP stack.
- Best website or online resource – The RISC OS Open Ltd forums.
- Best publication or offline resource – Archive magazine, now published by Gavin Smith.
- Best foreign language resource – Steffen Huber’s blog.
- Best show or event – the London Show, organised by ROUGOL.
- Most innovative or interesting project – the Iris Browser, from RISC OS Developments Ltd.
- Best overall contributor – Jeffrey Lee.
- Broken cog of the year – the state of many RISC OS company websites.
Congratulations to all the nominees and runners up – but especially to the winners. Where possible, winners will be emailed over the next week or so with details of their win.
And apologies if I’ve made any mistakes publishing the results!