Only two days left to vote!
This year, the leadership of the SIAF (Shareware Industry Awards Foundation), the group which produces the Software (nee Shareware) Industry Conference (SIC) each year, made the unfortunate decision not to present the Shareware Industry Awards this year. These premier awards were basically the Oscars of this industry, voted on by other industry members, and represented peer recognition. No SIA was presented for any standard game category last year (2008), so our own Pretty Good MahJongg was the last game to win one of these prestigious awards for the 2007 Best Non-Action Game.
In the absence of the Shareware Industry Awards, the People’s Choice Awards take center stage at the SIC banquet (presumably). With no nomination process, and voting open to anybody with an email address, there is no particular anticipation for these awards (and with no game PCA presented since 2006, even less for us). Nevertheless, I will support the awards process, so I submitted my ballot today.
The deadline is looming [Monday, June 15th], but if anybody has not yet voted and still has time to do so, we would certainly appreciate consideration of some of our products:
- Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition – our premier Mac product
- Pretty Good MahJongg – original tile solitaire for Windows
- Most Popular Solitaire – 30 solitaire game for both Windows and Mac
- Goodsol Solitaire 101 – best 101 games and climb mode for Windows
- Action Solitaire – solitaire games played against the clock for points
Although I certain could have done so, I did not fill all seven lines on my ballot with our games. I did an evaluation of the products that I use on a regular basis and which greatly aid my (development) productivity, and these products really stood out:
- Beyond Compare is an absolutely indispensable part of my development toolkit, and I use it almost daily for code diffs, file syncing, single line editing, and even viewing of Japanese/Unicode resource files (which VC6 cannot handle).
- Inno Setup is the easy choice for creating professional installers, and though it is not shareware, it is downloadable (free/donationware).
- Help & Manual is simply the best help editor I have ever used (though I will admit to preferring version 4 without the ribbon interface).
- PC-lint is critical to my C++ programming work and it is run, literally, alongside my compilations to guard against both silly mistakes and serious errors in order to help keep the quality of my code as high as possible (although there is no downloadable trial version, unfortunately).
To vote for the 2009 People’s Choice Awards, simply register to vote [Editor’s note: invalid link has been removed] (with just name and email address) and then follow the link that will be emailed to you and enter up to 7 software products. Easy.