The 2020 Awards Poll

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

While the poll was nominally for 2020, based on the initial review of articles published on RISCOSitory the period covered was from November 2019 until December 2020, providing a two month overlap with the previous year. The initial list of nominations based on that review was detailed on the RISC OS Open Ltd forum to initiate a discussion, with some changes made to the nominations as a result. These then became the primary nominations when the poll was formally opened. As well as the primary nominations, each category also had an option to vote for something else - these are detailed as the secondary nominations.

Opened for votes much later than intended, voting began in early April, 2021, and remained open until the end of June, giving people three months to make their choices. In that period, there were 141 valid entries, making it the fourth highest turnout, though not everyone voted in every category.

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 nominees, the runners up, and especially to the winners!

The 2020 RISC OS Awards Results

Best commercial software

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

Artworks; Ovation Pro; PowerTec PowerATAPI; TechWriter; TextEase and Prophet (combined - with a comment that both are in constant use in the voter's business environment).

And the winner, with 36% of the vote, is:
RiscOSM, from Sine Nomine.

Runner up position goes to TextEase Studio, from Elesar Ltd, with 18% of the vote.

Best non-commercial software

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

USBScopePlus; ADFFS; Director; ExtdVars; NetSurf; PrintPDF; SunFish; TextSeek; and YTPlay.

And the winner, with 33% of the vote, is:
DplngScan from Chris Johnson (originally David Pilling).

Runner up position goes to KinoAmp, from André Timmermans, with 20% of the vote.

Best game or diversion

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

Cavern; Infinite Bunner; Rail Pro; Rainbow Snake; Starfighter 3000.

And the winner, with 46% of the vote, is:
The port of ScummVM to RISC OS, by Cameron Cawley.

Runner up position goes to SCUBA Hunter, from AMCOG Games, with 18% of the vote.

Best internet or network connectivity software

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

Iris; VNCServer.

And the winner, with 29% of the vote, is:
NetSurf, by the NetSurf development team.

Runner up position goes to Messenger Pro, from R-Comp, with 26% of the vote.

Best development tool

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

ExtASM; BASIC; Iris; MsgMon; Zap.

And the winner, with 34% of the vote, is:
Python, ported to RISC OS by Chris Johns.

Runner up position goes to the Desktop Development Environment 30, from RISC OS Open Ltd, with 27% of the vote.

Best hardware

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

ARMBook; IanS Econet Podule; Raspberry Pi 4.

And the winner, with 40% of the vote, is:
The Raspberry Pi 400, from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Runner up position goes jointly to the 4té from R-Comp & Wi-Fi Sheep, and the WiFi + RTC HAT from Elesar Ltd, with 19% of the vote each.

Best solution for backwards compatibility

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

Arculator.

And the winner, with 39% of the vote, is:
RPCEmu, from Matthew and Peter Howkins.

Runner up position goes to Aemulor, from Adrian Lees, with 29% of the vote.

Best new development

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

The new internet stack; RISC OS 3.1 rebuilder.

And the winner, with 44% of the vote, is:
RISC OS 5.28, from RISC OS Open Ltd and contributors.

Runner up position goes to RISC OS Direct, from RISC OS Developments Ltd and Wi-Fi Sheep, with 19% of the vote.

Best show of initiative

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

ABUG for their virtual events; Ben Avison & RISC OS Open for adding automated checks to code submitted to gitlab; RISC OS Direct; and the Pi 400 Christmas special edition from RISC OS Open to hook new users.

And the winner, with 32% of the vote, is:
The anonymous developer working on the new TCP/IP stack.

Runner up position goes to Wi-Fi Sheep in conjunction with the Southwest Show organisers for live-streaming the event, with 20% of the vote.

Best website or online resource

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

The Wimp Programming in C web pages by Steve Fryatt.

And the winner, with 49% of the vote, is:
The RISC OS Open forums.

Runner up position goes to the Icon Bar website, with 18% of the vote.

Best publication or offline resource

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

GAG-News; the paper edition of the RISC OS 5 user guide.

And the winner, with 55% of the vote, is:
Archive Magazine, now published by Gavin Smith.

Runner up position goes jointly to Drag 'n Drop magazine from Christopher Dewhurst, and Acorn - A World in Pixels from Idesine, both with 17% of the vote.

Best foreign language resource

The primary nominations in this category were:

There were no secondary nominations in this category.

And the winner, with 33% of the vote, is:
Steffen Huber's blog.

Runner up position goes to RISCOS.fr, with 30% of the vote.

Best show or event

2020 was an unusual year because of the pandemic. The first show of the year took place as normal, but the second didn't take place, and the third became an online event. Similarly, user group meetings for some groups became online events, with attendance opened up for people wider afield.

The decision was therefore made to not have an initial list of options for this category, but to adopt the same process as the best overall contributor category, which comes later - that is to simply have a free text field for people to nominate whatever show or event they saw fit.

With that in mind, the full list of nominations that came in were:

  • ABUG virtual events
  • All the online meetings
  • Corona (!)
  • German GAG meeting
  • London Show
  • ROUGOL meetings
  • Gerph's talk at ROUGOL
  • Southwest Show
  • WROCC meetings
  • Sine Nomine's talk at WROCC
  • "You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver!"

And the winner, with 45% of the vote, is:
The London Show, organised this year as an online event by ROUGOL.

Based on individual votes for the nominees as listed, runner up position would go to the Southwest Show, with 10% of the vote. However, if the specified user group meetings are combined with the general meetings for those groups, the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC) also achieves 10% of the vote, while the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) gets 13%.

Therefore, since there is a degree of ambiguity in the way these votes can be counted, the runner up position is being awarded jointly to all three - the Southwest Show, the ROUGOL meetings, and the WROCC meetings.

Most innovative or interesting project

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

Nemo's UTF8 font handling/emoji/updates to the UI; Phil Pemberton's software preservation project; Recce; RISC OS on Linux; The prospect of being able to use multiple cores on RISC OS 5.

And the winner, with 50% of the vote, is:
The Iris web browser, from RISC OS Developments Ltd.

Runner up position goes to Jason Tribbeck and RISC OS Cloverleaf for the plans to overhaul the RISC OS sound system, with 14% of the vote.

Best overall contributor

Unlike the other categories, this category is always operated on a free vote basis with no initial nominations; anyone casting a vote can vote for any individual, company, or group they choose, via a text field.

The full list of nominations received is:

  • Andrew Rawnsley
  • Dave Higton
  • David Pilling
  • Gerph
  • Jeffrey Lee
  • Jon Abbott
  • Lee Noar
  • Matthew & Hilary Phillips
  • Peter Howkins
  • RISC OS Open Ltd
  • Rob Sprowson
  • Steffen Huber
  • Steve Revill
  • Timothy Baldwin

And the winner, with 34% of the vote, is:
Jeffrey Lee.

Runner up position goes to Steve Revill, with 11% of the vote.

Broken cog of the year

The primary nominations in this category were:

And the secondary nominations were:

  • A small number of (unnamed) individuals for polluting the RISC OS Open forums with inane ramblings.
  • Cloverleaf's over complex Kickstarter options.
  • Cloverleaf because they said the Kickstarter target was half the cash needed, then raised half of that amount.
  • Drobe for not being online anymore.
  • Missing wireless support.
  • RISC OS Developments for forking the OS.
  • RISC OS Developments for taking over Impression, only for nothing to change (still stalled).
  • The ridiculous delay making Iris available to all.

And the winner, with 41% of the vote, is:
The state of many RISC OS company websites.

Runner up position goes to RISC OS Cloverleaf for their copyright misunderstanding, and their reaction to it being pointed out to them, with 18% of the vote.

Use of the Award graphics and linking to this site

Where possible winners will be notified that they have won, and may use the appropriate rosette graphic(s) indicating the year and category on thier own websites and other advertising material, linking to the category on this page.

New for this year are two additional rosettes, shown below - one for nominees, and one for the runners up. Specified runners up in each category may use the runner up graphic, and nominees - both primary and secondary - may use the nominee graphic, linking to the relevant category on this page. However, neither nominees nor runners up will be directly notified. The anchor references to use are:

  • 01-commercialsw - best commercial software
  • 02-noncommsw - best non-commercial software
  • 03-diversion - best game or diversion
  • 04-nettool - best internet or network connectivity software
  • 05-devtool - best development tool
  • 06-hardware - best hardware
  • 07-backcomp - best solution for backwards compatibility
  • 08-newdev - best new development
  • 09-initiative - best show of initiative
  • 10-onlineres - best website or online resource
  • 11-offlineres - best publication or offline resource
  • 12-foreignres - best foreign language resource
  • 13-event - best show or event
  • 14-project - most innovative or interesting project
  • 15-contributor - best overall contributor
  • 16-brokencog - broken cog of the year
RISC OS Awards 2020 nominee rosette   RISC OS Awards 2020 runner up rosette

Additional resources

A PDF file of the slideshow used to present these award results at the RISC OS User Group of London meeting on Monday, 16th August, 2021.