The 2017 Awards Poll

This was the fifth annual awards poll run by RISCOSitory, along with a survey, on the RISC OS Awards website.

Continuing the policy started for the 2014 poll, while the poll was nominally for 2017, the period covered was from November 2016 until December 2017, providing a two month overlap.

The poll was opened for votes later than intended, on 20th March, 2018, and was closed on 26th May, 2018, giving people just over two months to make their choices. In that period, there were 106 valid entries - a notable decrease on most of the previous polls, with the only comparable result being 2014.

As before, the whole process has run smoothly. The interim votes were accessed on a variety of systems, but a RISC OS computer was used to perform all of the processing and counting, using a combination of a small program written in BBC BASIC and Colton Software's Fireworkz.

And the results of that processing can be found below - congratulations to all the winners!

The 2017 RISC OS Awards Results

Best commercial software

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 36% of the vote, is:
ArtWorks2, from MW Software.

Best non-commercial software

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 30% of the vote, is:
Otter Browser, ported by Chris Gransden.

 

Best game or diversion

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 25% of the vote, is:
Manga, from Rick Murray.

 

Best hardware

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 32% of the vote, is:
Wispy, from RISCOSbits .

Best solution for backwards compatibility

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 49% of the vote, is:
Aemulor from Adrian Lees/Spellings.net.

 

Best new development

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 40% of the vote, is:
Experimental multi-core support, Jeffrey Lee

Best show of initiative

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 48% of the vote, is:
Adrian Lees and Spellings.net for making Aemulor free to download for all platforms.

 

Best website or online resource

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 53% of the vote, is:
The RISC OS Open website and forum.

Best publication or offline resource

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 40% of the vote, is:
The updated BBC BASIC manual from RISC OS Open Ltd.

 

Best foreign language resource

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 52% of the vote, is:
RISCOS.fr.

Best show or event

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 43% of the vote, is:
The Wakefield Show.

 

Most innovative or interesting project

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 37% of the vote, is:
The Linux port of RISC OS, by Timothy Baldwin.

Best overall contributor

This was the one category that didn't have any nominations, and instead relied on those people voting to suggest which individual, team or company they feel deserves recognition as having made a worthy contribution to RISC OS.

Of the 106 valid voting forms received, only 59 voters entered something for this field - and of those, one individual was named in just over half of the entries.

The top three, results, are:

  • In third place, with 7% of the vote: The RISC OS Open team.
  • In second place, with 12% of the vote: Andrew Rawnsley and R-Comp.
  • In first place, with 53% of the vote: Jeffrey Lee.
 

Broken cog of the year

The nominations in this category were:

  • Vince Hudd - For being so far behind with everything, especially the Awards poll!
  • RISC OS Open Ltd - For the not-so-epic ePic announcement and launch - a nice (and sensible) update to their product line, but not worthy of the way it was hyped up before the show at which it was launched.
  • RISC OS Open Ltd - For 'forgetting' about DDE28, resulting in it not being publicised enough

And the winner, with 33% of the vote, is:
RISC OS Open Ltd for the not-so-epic ePic announcement and launch.