A month ago, Hawk Wings blogged about a new beta version of Pod2Go, a utility that allows you to sync your Mail.app messages (and other things) to any iPod except the shuffle.

The beta has now been officially released.

As well as its new, faster method of dealing with Apple Mail, it features improved, faster handling of iCal data. The changelog lists other significant improvements.

Pod2Go is shareware (USD 15) and is available from the developer’s web site.

No doubt the Internet will be soggy with self-indulgent nostalgia today. Here’s my contribution.

Hawk Wings spluttered into life at the end of July this year as a way to learn about blogging and as a tribute to a little app that I quite like.

It was relaxing and a pleasant distraction from the real world, so I continued. Over the last five months, a few of my posts proved popular (by Hawk Wings’ standards) with readers:

Top Five Most Popular Posts

1. MacFreePOPs: Getting emails from hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, SquirrelMail, AOL, etc. MacFreePOPs just seems to run and run. I don’t know where the hits come from, but it is by far the most popular thing I ever blogged.
2. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have. Recent and popular, some people found this a useful entry point into the world of plug-ins and/or fun to disagree with.
3. Switching from Thunderbird to Apple Mail. With help from Andreas Amann, this post collected some helpful ways to make the break from Thunderbird.
4. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail. Never was a niche market focussed on time-efficiency willing to spend so much time reading about how to do it :-)
5. Apple Mail: The Early Years. My first blogging “triumph”. The pre-history of Mail.app as NeXTMail in NeXTSTEP.

But sometimes it happens — on blogs and in life — that the best things are not the most popular ones.

Here are five posts that added something which wasn’t there before:

Top Five Best Posts

1. Apple Mail: The Early Years. With help from Don Yacktman and John Kheit, I was able to gather together some oral history before it disappears.
2. Putting your Apple Mail on an iPod. Jeffrey Glover was kind enough to share a step-by-step walk-through on storing your Mail folder on a iPod.
3. What’s in your Mail folder?. A Cook’s Tour of your Mail folder. Poking around in order to write this was fun.
4. Services and Apple Mail. A small contribution to a much neglected aspect of Mac OS X and of working smarter in Apple Mail.
5. Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part I and Part II. Blogging is often about being a magpie, picking shiny things out of the never-ending piles of other people’s posts.

   Here I think I really wrestled something to the ground, got some understanding of GTD, and produced two posts that added a bit to the ways in which Mail.app can be used.

Of course, there were less successful moments too.

I discovered several new Mail features that have been around since Jaguar and completely misunderstood what the new iChat SSL certificates were about. Also my arguments in favour of top-posting proved more persuasive to me than anyone else.

Since its birth in July, Hawk Wings has served 901,547 pages and moved up 3,099,986 places in Technorati’s rankings. Nothing to be too proud of, as there are still 22,669 blogs people would rather read than this one.

See you in 2006 (unless 10.4.4 sees us first).

Kainjow has released a new beta version of Pod2Go, its iPod syncing app.

As well as a number of other new features, the way it handles Apple Mail messages has significantly improved.

The developer says,

Mail has been completely reworked. No longer does it use AppleScript to communicate with Mail.app (which required Mail.app to be open). Now it reads from the same files Mail.app does, and is significantly faster (although the first sync will be slower). Syncing will be slightly faster when Mail is not open also.

The beta version also adds an option to sync “Flagged messages only”.

Pod2Go 1.6 b02 can be downloaded from the developer’s web site.

UPDATE: Pod2Go 1.6 released, 2 January 2006.

Pod2Go is an app that allows you to sync your Mail.app messages (and lots of other things) to any iPod except the shuffle.

A new version has been released with a number of improvements, including the ability to sync with iCal better and to import news feeds from NetNewsWire. You can read the full changelog here.

Pod2Go costs USD 12 and is available from the developer’s web site.

iPod It allows you to transfer your PIM data to your iPod so it’s available to read whenever you need it. It supports the transfer of information from Entourage and Stickies, as well Mail, Address Book and iCal.

It also allows you to download RSS feeds, weather forecasts and news headlines directly to your iPod. A screenshot of its main window shows just how much stuff it allows you to transfer:

You can automate the syncing of your information by choosing to synch on launch and automatically exit afterwards and/or sync the information manually.

All versions of the iPod and iPod mini software are supported.

iPod It was updated today. The new version, 2.5.2, identifies Apple Mail mailboxes by account name and well as mailbox name, so that you can easily identify the mailboxes for particular accounts after the transfer. It also improves Event and Contact handling with Entourage 2004 SP2.

iPod It is shareware (USD 14.95) and is available from the developer’s web site.

But before you buy, check out the other applications that transfer Mail.app‘s messages to your iPod: Pod2Go (slightly cheaper at USD 12) and MailToPod (even cheaper, USD 10) which doesn’t yet work with Tiger, but soon will.