RISC OS Awards 2013

Picking up the baton from those who have carried out RISC OS awards polls in the past – the Acorn press of old, followed by the Drobe, Icon Bar, and RISCOScode websites – RISCOSitory is pleased to announce that it is conducting an awards poll to celebrate the best of RISC OS for 2012/13.

The poll – which will be combined with a simple survey to form a picture of the RISC OS landscape – will take place on its own website and, in time, the aim will be to archive the results of previous polls on that site, so that they can always be found in one place.

So point your browsers at the RISC OS Awards website and take a look through the nominations for the first RISCOSitory annual awards poll.

A voting form will appear in mid-December and will remain online for three to four weeks, with the results being published some time in January 2014.

Nice one, Vince!

Well written and good looking web pages, Vince.
Can we nominate the award website for an award ?!?
Will give it a plug on RISCOScode, and a tweet too..

Had a look a week ago, but no voting available yet. <nudge><nudge> ;-)

I’ll give my thoughts to kick off a discussion prior to the start of voting.

I am interested to see how the results turn out because while I think that both Aemulor Pi¹ and Ben’s DiscTools are great ideas, surely they are overshadowed by managing to get all of the stuff in NutPi for such a low price? It is, essentially, like a RISC OS starter kit.

For non-commercial, I would be surprised if Pluto didn’t clinch this award. Going open source is a big gesture, and one that will help carry the product to new systems and, maybe, support for newer methods and protocols?

Hardware? Got to be the RTC module, for me. You can’t sensibly develop with a build system that uses timestamps if your time always begins in 1970! Which reminds me, I ought to order a battery for the Beagle.

The best new development? I would say we should defer ImpressionX until next year when a runnable version is available for the masses. That way it won’t have to compete against RISC OS 5 for older machines which is crazy-awesome, or SD card support which is just awesome. You can probably guess how I’d vote here.

Best show of initiative? I’m inclined to say NutPi vs PlingStore, but this actually will require some thinking about. All are worthy. Certainly, we shouldn’t favour concrete things (like NutPi) over ephemeral things (such as a show) as the shows serve the purpose of getting ourselves known. Really, if ROOL’s budget was larger, it would be good if they did a few non-RISC OS shows right next to the RaspberryPi guys. We might not be “yet another Linux clone”, but there is something to be said for that, too.

Best online resource – and ROOL isn’t listed? What, after all the recent work in expanding the documentation? Wah! There is so much more to RISC OS Open (dot org) than the crap written by user #539!

Best publication? Excuse me – where is this ?

Best show – can’t vote, attended none of them. :-( Which is an interesting question in itself – will you have an “opt out” vote option, Vince, or must a vote be cast for each entry? I could not provide a sensible reply to this question.

Most innovative/interesting project – actually, it isn’t listed but I’d give my vote to Colin’s work with USB and also his continuing, expanding, support for USB audio devices.

¹ Didn’t work at all for me, the demo hung the system. Was there an incompatibility with v5.21 or something? Because the demo time was very short, I didn’t bother doing anything further…

Best show – can’t vote, attended none of them.

You could vote for the ROUGOL Paul Fellows meeting, as you can virtually attend that by reading the transcript!

Not that I’m trying to rig the vote of course :-)

Had a look a week ago, but no voting available yet. ;-)

The main voting form is done (the HTML, anyway – I need to remind myself how to do the PHP bits; It’s not something I dabble with very often). I need to think the survey questions out and add those – I don’t want there to be too many, or for them to be too intrusive. As I said above: a simple survey. Perhaps I’ll add my initial thoughts below, which will give people time to comment on them before I finalise it. (This weekend, probably).

The best new development? I would say we should defer ImpressionX until next year when a runnable version is available for the masses.

Until the news emerged, everyone thought ImpressionX was being worked on by XAT (and had stagnated). Richard taking it on was a new development in the required period – and has the added bonus that it was mostly unexpected.

That way it won’t have to compete against RISC OS 5 for older machines which is crazy-awesome, or SD card support which is just awesome.

True – but then again, who knows. (And anyway, it may very well pop up again next year, though not in the same category.)

Best online resource – and ROOL isn’t listed? What, after all the recent work in expanding the documentation?

TBH, I hadn’t even thought about the ROOL website as an online resource – but that’s a fair shout. However, given that ROOL pop up in other categories, it’s been more than a week since I revealed the nominations, I don’t think it’s right to change it now. (Especially since, to keep with my maximum of five per category, I’d have to give another nomination the boot!)

Wah! There is so much more to RISC OS Open (dot org) than the crap written by user #539!

Dare I look to see who that is/what they’ve said? ;)

Best publication? Excuse me – where is this ?

That will fall neatly into next year’s vote because it’s in my backlog of news still to post on RISCOSitory.

Best show – can’t vote, attended none of them. :-(

As Bryan says, the transcript of the ROUGOL meeting is online – and the link on the nominations takes you to the RISCOSitory post, from which there is a link to the transcript. Similarly, the shows I’ve suggested all link to the show reports on RISCOSitory. You could form an opinion by reading about them. However…

Which is an interesting question in itself – will you have an “opt out” vote option, Vince, or must a vote be cast for each entry? I could not provide a sensible reply to this question.

I hadn’t, but that’s a good point – and I have now. :)

Most innovative/interesting project – actually, it isn’t listed but I’d give my vote to Colin’s work with USB and also his continuing, expanding, support for USB audio devices.

That’s a good point. Even though it’s late in the day, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make a change here because, unlike the online resources, there are currently only three nominations, so I can add that without booting off another. Before I do, though, a question for anyone who may like to comment: Should the nomination perhaps be for Colin and Dave, rather than just Colin? (I admit I haven’t followed that particular discussion too closely, but I know Dave was very clear that Colin’s work was vital when we spoke at Portsmouth.)

Ah yes… the survey questions.

As I said, I only want it to be a simple survey, so as not to be too off-putting or intrusive. I was thinking something like:

Which version of RISC OS do you use most? Giving the options 2.x, 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x

What is your primary RISC OS platform? With the options Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard, PandaBoard, Iyonix, RiscPC, A7000, VirtualAcorn, RPCEmu, and Other.

By choice, do you use any platforms other than RISC OS, yes or no?
(i.e. if you use Windows at work because your cruel, evil boss makes you do so, then that doesn’t matter: that isn’t by choice.)

If so, which operating system: Windows, MacOS, Other Linux-based, Other, or N/A

And on what processor architecture: ARM, Intel/AMD, Other, or N/A

And finally, do you use it more or less than RISC OS (y/n/na)

I suppose age groups and gender might not go amiss, as well.

Thoughts?

As I said in reply to Rick, I’m probably going to finish off the form and upload it this weekend.

(Add -based to the RISC OS platforms for Pi, BeagleBoard and PandaBoard – as in, for example, the ARMini is based on a BeagleBoard)

Nice to see this come back. The survey questions look good to me.

And finally, do you use it more or less than RISC OS (y/n/na)

I’d add an “About equal” option there.

Best website or online resource

ROOL’s site, and The Iconbar (forum especially) are always worth a look.

Best new development

There’s the work being done for the software preservation project. So far it’s produced floppy disc image reader, which supports 3 types of floppy images, updates to the QTM music player, various compatibility layers for old music modules, and old screen resolutions. Currently they’re working on a compatibility layer for running old software on newer systems. Oh and they’ve acquired the rights to distribute various old commercial games for free.

• Old games on new screens
• Software preservation project bearing fruit
• Latest JIT emulation developments
• 26-bit CPU support

I’d add an “About equal” option there.

Yes. I was finishing off the form earlier, and I realised that as I was putting that question in. (I also added a few questions more than those I originally included – such as how long has the visitor been using RISC OS).

All of the survey questions have an “I’d rather not say” option which is selected by default: That way people can skip right past the survey if they like and just submit the awards votes only, and the default option won’t skew the results.

ROOL’s site, and The Iconbar (forum especially) are always worth a look.

Rick pointed out this site in his previous post – and TIB is another that I just didn’t think of when putting it together. I’m not going to add it now, though, for the same reason I gave before about not adding ROOL: the nominations have been up for a while, so it wouldn’t be fair to drop any existing ones off now, in order to keep the maximum of five.

There’s the work being done for the software preservation project.

That had completely slipped my mind until I was reading through the completed¹ form earlier, and would have been a worthy inclusion. However, the same problem applies – to include it in the best new development category would mean losing another at a very late stage in the day.

The good news, though, is that I have the project in my ever growing backlog of news to publish – so it’ll qualify for next year’s vote.

Things should be simpler next year, too – because this is the first year I’ve done it (and it’s been two years since anyone did) I had to go back through two years worth of news to decide on the nominations; so things had to catch my eye, or already be lurking in the strange and mysterious thing that is my mind.

This time, I know before I even start posting news on RISCOSitory that I intend to run the awards next year – so I’ll be keeping that in mind as I post, with a file of contenders updated with each new article that appears.

¹ The PHP is done, as is the form itself. I just need to tidy up the HTML here and there, and perhaps add some additional text, and tweak the CSS. I also need to give the voter a sensible page after they vote. That’s tomorrow’s job, so it should be online by tomorrow evening at the latest, depending on what time I get to it.

Edit: When copying and pasting something to quote, it’s important to actually copy before pasting, so that you don’t just paste the previous quote.

The good news, though, is that I have the project in my ever growing backlog of news to publish – so it’ll qualify for next year’s vote.

OK, fair enough. :)

BTW, I’m not sure NetSurf news has been getting disseminated much in RISC OS land since Drobe ceased activity. We tend only to post info about changes to the NetSurf mailing lists. I can post articles on TIB, but I don’t like posting NetSurf news there myself because I’m heavily involved with the project. Here’s some of the stuff from the last year:

• Beginnings of early, experimental JavaScript support available in test builds.
• Rewritten textareas fixed all the crashing and brokenness.
• Made a completely new autobuilder that builds NetSurf automatically (whenever we make a change in the code) for multiple operating systems (including RISC OS), multiple hardware architectures, and with different compilers. It also does automated testing, test coverage reports, and static analysis for us.
• NetSurf 3.0 released. Biggest change was the switch to using our new document object model library, LibDOM, which will enable us to support dynamic changes to pages triggered by JavaScript eventually. Also included the new textareas and a lot of other changes too.
• A Summary of changes since NetSurf 3.0 includes completely rewritten treeviews, and undo/redo support for the textareas.
• Huge speedup to our CSS engine with pretty profiling graphs. :)

There’s more on the news page.

Note the TTF2f item on 7 Dec 2011. That plea for a maintainer for TTF2f is still valid — we never had a response.

cough Don’t think it’s fair to nominate ourselves, but a thing called RISC OS for Raspberry Pi might have happened during the 2012/13 timeframe…

cough Don’t think it’s fair to nominate ourselves, but a thing called RISC OS for Raspberry Pi might have happened during the 2012/13 timeframe…

Make it non-beta and an up to date copy in NOOBS for Xmas and it gets the first nomination for next years awards.

BTW, I’m not sure NetSurf news has been getting disseminated much in RISC OS land since Drobe ceased activity.

A quick search on RISCOSitory shows most mentions of NetSurf are in the context of shows – and most of those don’t say much, perhaps little more than a version being released at the show, that sort of thing. Of the things you mention…

Beginnings of early, experimental JavaScript support available in test builds.

That did get a post of its own on the site – albeit quite a bit later than when it actually happened!

NetSurf 3.0 released.

That was mentioned in the Wakefield 2013 show report – with a bit more detail than I normally manage for NetSurf in the reports. Probably because of the significance.

A Summary of changes since NetSurf 3.0

and

Huge speedup to our CSS engine

Both appear to be in my backlog. (This takes the form of a mailbox into which everything is either moved if it comes from a usenet/email source – sometimes along with subsequent comments – or to which I email myself a link or some notes if its another source).

The other things you mention aren’t in there AFAICS, which probably means I didn’t see them at the time you announced them (or when I finally got around to reading the list).

The mailbox currently contains just over 170 items. Some of those will be duplicated, where I get the same thing from multiple sources, and some will include subsequent discussions – so I’d estimate a backlog of 100-ish items.

Some of them have probably also been mentioned in show reports, which means I won’t bother posting about them individually¹ – and a lot of them will probably not get a post of their own, instead a paragraph or two in a snippets post.

I can see some user group meeting announcements, too – I don’t usually do anything about those, since they should be covered less specifically by the calendar page.

Either way, I have a lot of catching up to do.

I think I might adopt a slightly different approach when I can sit down and start posting again. I try not to just copy announcements verbatim, and to add at least a little background or additional info where possible, even if it isn’t much. Perhaps, at least when I’m very busy, I should relax that approach a little, just to get things posted.

¹ The golden rule here is that if you announce something in the run up to a show, and you’re going to be demonstrating it at the show, that’s more than likely where it’s going to be mentioned, rather than in a post of its own.

cough Don’t think it’s fair to nominate ourselves, but a thing called RISC OS for Raspberry Pi might have happened during the 2012/13 timeframe…

Do you know, I thought I had included that, but nope!

facepalm!

Grr. The problem now is that to keep the maximum of five in the best new development category (which is where I should have put it), I’d have to drop something else – just as with other suggestions people have made.

So… tough :p

You’ll just have to satisfy yourself with the fact that ROOL is nominated for:

• Nut Pi in Best commercial project
• RISC OS 5 for old hardware in Best new development
• Organising the Portsmouth Show in Best show of initiative
• Putting together Nut Pi in Best show of initiative
• Portsmouth being nominated for Best show or event
• and, indirectly, London 2012 being put forward for Best show or event – the main reason that one stood out being the fact that RISC OS for the Pi was officially launched at the show!

I think ROOL gets a fair showing, all things considered ;)

The mailbox currently contains just over 170 items.

That’s a lot! I know from my occasional TIB article posting that writing up news takes a lot more time than people might think. :)

The problem now is that to keep the maximum of five in the best new development category

Why are you limiting yourself to an arbitrary selection of five entries?

There are two ways forward -

• Include all of the suggestions. As there is only one winner (excepting a tie?), it shouldn’t be a big deal how many options there are so long as it isn’t crazy-long.

Or

• Do it like the French vote. Everybody can vote on a big long list, and the five most popular can be presented on the poll proper.

I just don’t think the “third” option (say tough and ignore it) is really a viable option. ;-)

Why are you limiting yourself to an arbitrary selection of five entries?

The main reason is because that’s what I decided to do when I started out on this. It wouldn’t surprise me if there is a style guide for this sort of thing out there somewhere, and it suggests keeping the number of options for each question to as few as possible – an application of the KISS principle.

(Having said that, the survey question answers do go beyond five. C’est la vie.)

Anyway, the voting form is now live. I’ll announce it on usenet and RISCOSitory tomorrow.

Anyway, the voting form is now live.

Yay, it went up today. I can tick the 30-39 age range box. Can’t do that tomorrow. :-)

[cheating slightly, it has gone midnight here, but you’re in the UK so I <cough>assumed</cough> GMT was in effect.<cough><cough><cough>]

(^_^)

Well Rick, the cake is a lie (meh) but don’t let that spoil the fun [/insert random shounen anime character].

Yay, it went up today. I can tick the 30-39 age range box. Can’t do that tomorrow. :-)

Well, if I’d known that, I’d have delayed things a little while longer! :p

(Although you could then have left the selection at its default “I’d rather not say” – and when the data’s analysed the system will simply have assumed “really, really, unbelievably old!”)

But seriously, many happy returns – and welcome to the the next (my) age range.

I can still remember my 40th… I spent it up a mountain in Wales¹, but I had an extra ham sandwich to celebrate.

¹ I also celebrated by taking a trip to Northern Italy, walking in the Alps each day I was there – but that trip was about a week after my birthday. It would have amounted to the same thing, though, except with higher mountains and lots of snow.

I can tick the 30-39 age range box. Can’t do that tomorrow.

お誕生日おめでとうございます！ ;)

お誕生日おめでとうございます！

Joyeux anniversaire :-)

(And sorry to contribute to the hijacking of this thread Vince – great stuff with the awards!)

Strange there wasn’t a post in this thread… anyway, the results are up:

http://www.riscosawards.co.uk/2013/index.html