A final call for votes in this year’s awards poll

Along with an updated look at the alternative votes

The 2020 RISC OS Awards poll has now underway for more than a couple of months, which means it’s about time a final deadline for votes was issued so that the hundreds hundred or so votes that have been cast can be counted up and the results published. That deadline, therefore, is the end of this month – 30th June. If you haven’t yet voted, please ensure you do so by then.

If you’ve looked at the options and decided one or more of them aren’t what you’d like to vote for, you can always opt for something else and pop what you’re voting for in the text field for that category – just as many others have done. With that in mind, then, here is a final round up of what other people have voted for in case it’ll help you make up your own mind.

For the Best Commercial Software category, people have voted for Ovation Pro, the PowerTec PowerATAPI filing system, and Techwriter. For the Best Non-commercial Software, alternative votes have been received for SunFish, ADFFS, ExtdVars, Director, and NetSurf. And for Best Game or Diversion, Cavern, Eternal Bunner, and RailPro have all been voted for.

Iris has been voted for as Best Internet or Network Connectivity Software, and it has also been offered for the Best Development Tool, along with BBC BASIC and Zap. Best Hardware, meanwhile, has received suggestions for IanS Econet Podule, and the Raspberry Pi 4.

The Best Solution for Backwards Compatibility category has Arculator nominated, and for Best New Development there have been votes for the new internet stack, and the RISC OS 3.1 Rebuilder.

RISC OS Open have been nominated for Best Show of Initiative for the Pi 400 Christmas Special Edition, and they’ve also found their way into the Best Publication or Offline Resource Category for the paper edition of the RISC OS 5 User Guide, along with GAG-News.

Despite it being one of the available options, RISCOS Berlin has been offered as the Best Foreign Language Resource – just to confuse me when I come to process the results!

The Best Show or Event this year has no options to choose from – both 2020, the nominal year for the poll, and 2021 have been a bit special thanks to the pandemic, so the only way to vote is to suggest something in the text box, and it has seen votes for the Southwest Show, the London Show, Gerph’s ROUGOL talk, Since Nomine’s WROCC talk, the WROCC meetings in general, and the German GAG meeting, along with a tongue in cheek vote for the Handforth Parish Council meeting featuring Jackie Weaver, and one for just Corona. Well, I suppose the pandemic is definitely an event!

Alternative suggestions for Most Innovative or Interesting Project are Phil Pemberton’s project to preserve old software, and the prospect of being able to use multiple cores on RISC OS 5.

The category that is a free-text vote every year is Best Overall Contributor, and this year’s hall of fame is made up of Steve Revill, RISC OS Open Ltd, Peter Howkins, Jeffrey Lee, Andrew Rawnsley, Jon Abbott, Steffen Huber, David Pilling, Robert Sprowson, Matthew and Hilary Phillips, Lee Noar, and Dave Higton.

Broken Cog of the Year – the final category – has votes for the people who post off-topic stuff (the specific wording being ‘inane ramblings’) on the RISC OS Open forum, and Drobe for no longer being online. Cloverleaf have received votes for different reasons – because their Kickstarter options were too complicated, and because they said the Kickstarter campaign was for half the amount of money they needed, and they only managed to hit the halfway mark on that anyway. RISC OS Developments have similarly received votes for different reasons – for taking over Impression only for nothing to change, suggesting that the project to make the software 32-bit has stalled, and for forking the operating system, which I assume refers to RISC OS Direct, but that’s really a distro rather than a fork.

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