Last week saw this year's annual Consumer Electronics Show go down in Las Vegas. The world's largest consumer technology tradeshow, it's traditionally a source for many product announcements from the major manufacturers. This year there was a lot of focus on 3D TVs, e-readers, and, most importantly for us, next-generation ARM-powered goodies.

 
 

For the past several years Drobe have run their yearly Drobe awards, in which members of the public nominate and vote for the RISC OS products and people who they believe have best served the platform over the course of the year. After a quick check with Drobe foreman Chris Williams to make sure he wasn't planning on running the awards this year, the staff at TIB decided it would be a good idea if we picked up the metaphorical torch and ran the awards ourselves. So, ladies and gentlemen, prepare for the first annual Icon Bar awards!
 
This year there will be four categories open for nomination. Once a suitable number of nominations have been collected, the voting booths will be opened. Then at the end of the year the votes will be tallied and the winner and runner-up for each category will be revealed. The categories for this year are:

• Best commercial product
• Best non-commercial product
• Best new development
• Best RISC OS show/event

Of course, if you want to nominate something that doesn't fit into any of the above categories, feel free to send it in and we'll see what we can do!
 
Update: Thanks for all your suggestions. Voting is now open until the end of the year.
 

After hearing the news that videos from the recent RISC OS London Show are now available online, I decided to take a look at what RISCOS Ltd had to say in their presentation. The results I found to be quite shocking...
 
Disclaimer: Although I've obviously been doing a lot of work for RISC OS Open recently, I am not a member of ROOL, nor am I speaking on behalf of ROOL (or The Icon Bar). The opinions expressed below are mine and mine alone, and any likeness or resemblence to any other person's opinions is entirely coincidental.
 
 

This was going to be a pretty dry fluff piece about the gaming events going on in my home city, something I'd pop in to between renewing my travel pass and getting some new shoelaces.  Then something slightly surreal happened to me.
 
I've just spent around an hour in the company of one of the men partly responsible for getting me into computers in the first place.  And I didn't recognise him.
 

Acorn World - now there's a name from the past. The final show was cancelled in 1998 when Acorn closed its workstations division - now it's back thanks to Dave Moore and the Retro Reunited team. The show, held over the weekend at the Cedar Court Hotel in Huddersfield, offered a range of vintage games consoles and bizarre Acorn hardware hacks. The Acorn scene was mostly 8-bit oriented although there was some RISC OS coverage too.
 

Last week saw this year's annual Computex Taipei computer trade show go down in Taiwan. The second largest computer trade show in the world, it's traditionally a source for many product announcements from the major manufacturers. Most of the time these announcements are of x86-based products, but this year it was ARM's turn to take center stage, delivering on last year's announcement that ARM were to make a big push into the netbook market. Although none of the products listed here are in stores at the moment, all announcements point towards a good number of them being made available before the year is out.

 
 

The 2009 Wakefield Show takes place today.

• Stuart Tyrrell Developments' have unveiled their VPod graphics accelerator. For £149, the podule card for the Risc PC range of computers features hardware acceleration and high resolutions such as 1680x1050 in 16 million colours.
• NetSurf 2.0 has been released and is available for download on the NetSurf website.
• RISC OS Open has been demonstrated running on a A7000 computer.

Link: Wakefield Show news (via Twitter)

 

Saturday 6 December saw the Midlands User Group's RISC OS Christmas Show in Birmingham. The show was held at Birmingham University's Guild of Students, and was attended by a steady stream of people throughout the day. What follows is a brief report and some photos from the event.