The 2019 Awards Poll

This was the sixth 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 this one was nominally for 2019, the period covered was from November 2018 until December 2019, providing a two month overlap.

The poll was opened for votes much later than intended, on 27th March, 2020, and remained open until 30th June, giving people just over three months to make their choices. In that period, there were just 102 valid entries.

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 2019 RISC OS Awards Results

Best commercial software

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 29% of the vote, is:
ArtWorks2, from MW Software.

Best non-commercial software

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 33% of the vote, is:
PipeDream, from Stuart Swales / Colton Software.

 

Best game or diversion

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 37% of the vote, is:
Manga, from Rick Murray.

 

Best hardware

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 56% of the vote, is:
ARMBook, from R-Comp.

Best solution for backwards compatibility

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 45% of the vote, is:
Aemulor, from Adrian Lees

 

Best new development

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 23% of the vote, is:
Easier networking with RPCEmu - Matthew and Peter Howkins.

Best show of initiative

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 40% of the vote, is:
RISC OS Developments Ltd and Wi-Fi Sheep for RISC OS Direct.

 

Best website or online resource

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 58% 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 44% of the vote, is:
Archive magazine, from Glastonbury Press (Jim Nagel)

 

Best foreign language resource

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 51% 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 2019 London Show.

 

Most innovative or interesting project

The nominations in this category were:

And the winner, with 49% of the vote, is:
The web browsers being developed on behalf of RISC OS Developments by Leo Noar and Michael Grunditz.

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 102 valid voting forms received, only 32 voters entered something for this field (and one voter offered three names, with one third of a vote each - two of whom are amongst the winning three). With so few suggestions overall, there were unsurprisingly a number of people who received just a single vote!

However, the three with the most votes, in reverse order, are:

  • In third place, with 7% of the vote: Rob Sprowson.
  • In second place, with 13% of the vote: Adrian Lees.
  • And in first place, with 29% of the vote: Jeffrey Lee.
 

Broken cog of the year

The nominations in this category were:

  • CJE Micro's - For not attending the Southwest Show again
  • RISC OS companies and developers - The plague of lastiminutitis, with show developments and announcements being very last minute.
  • RISC OS Open Ltd - For publishing news on their own site and, apparently, nowhere else. Blink and you'll miss it.
  • The RISC OS world as a whole - For the typical state of RISC OS related websites, which usually look like they're stuck in the late 1990s and/or aren't updated often enough!
  • Vince Hudd - For being so far behind with everything - including this poll (AGAIN!)

And the winner, with 52% of the vote, is:
The RISC OS world as a whole - For the typical state of RISC OS related websites, which usually look like they're stuck in the late 1990s and/or aren't updated often enough!