The most important part from a contest or lottery is, of course, the winner's announcing. To ease the process of extractions, you can use The Hat, a simple program that randomly selects individual and pairs of names from a given list.
This application can also be used to create a random order for a group of names, a feature that might come in handy for teachers when checking student's presentations.
To be honest, I was hoping for more advanced visual and audio effects during shuffle process. Unfortunately, this aspect proved to be an important disadvantage, as the option to flash different colors bothered my eyes and the sound effect was a bit annoying.
More to that, when importing names from local documents, the program automatically removes the old names from the list and adds the ones from the imported file.
Even though The Hat offers you the results you need, my guess is that there are still many improvements that need to be made, like new audio effects or the ability to import names from PDF/DOC files.
v2.3 [Jul 24, 2009]
Fixed a bug that would cause a runtime error and not allow the program to start for some users. Added Clipboard functionality to copy and paste names from and to the program.
