Hawk Wings, as you know, is supposed to be a blog focussed on Mail.app with an occasional nod to other interesting apps or developments in the worlds of email and productivity.

Ideally, I aim to post one interesting “Not Apple Mail” thing and two Mail related items a day. At least, that’s the plan.

Today, for the first time in a long while, it didn’t work out that way. The only news was non-Mail.app news.

NetNewsWire does a fantastic job of scouring the Web for me. But when nothing appears, I usually restrain myself from making it up.

Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

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Alisdair McDiarmid has produced a walk-through for one of Quicksilver’s lesser-known but very powerful time-saving tricks—executing very fast web searches in Wikipedia, on Amazon, news sites or wherever.

I knew Quicksilver could do this, but hadn’t forced myself to experience how good it is until today.

By highlighting some text and pressing ⌘-E, you can copy text to Mac OS X’s shared find clipboard.

Then, by bringing up Quicksilver and selecting a web search bookmark (there are hundreds of pre-made ones to choose from for every imaginable query), you can search your web site of choice in seconds:

Now I can find books on Amazon, the latest news from the BBC on the rise and rise of Borat, definitions for obscure technical terms and acronyms on Wikipedia, words in the Oxford English Dictionary or software on MacUpdate in much less than a tenth of the time it took me yesterday.

And so can you.

[Props also to Allan Odgaard of TextMate fame whose walk-through on this feature seems to be the original.]

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I haven’t seen a piece of screen art this good since Easter .

A fine piece of satirical screenshotting on current events.

And a little sliver of Mail.app there to add distinction.

[Via Daring Fireball ]

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Google Reader Notifier’s developer Troels Bay has been busy. Since I last posted about his menubar utility for Google’s newfeed reader just over a week ago, he’s updated it twice.

The newest version (0.37) released today adds a “Mark all as read” option to the drop-down menu, puts newest articles on the top of the list and adds an icon to show when your connection to Google Reader is lost.

The previous update, earlier in the week, added the ability to turn off the sound notification and the option to display between five and fifty items in the menu.

Google Reader Notifier is free, open-source and avilable from Troels’ web site .

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The third-party Menubar utility for Google’s news reader, Google Reader Notifier, has been updated with a few nifty new features and the removal of a bug in its version check feature.

The new version (0.22) sports a new icon, adds an option to view the number of unread articles in the Menubar, and has a redesigned menu layout that matches the general Gmail Notifier style. It now also makes a sound (”ping!”) when new articles appear just like the Gmail notifier.

At the same time, a bug that prevented it from properly auto-checking for new versions has been fixed.

It’s not enough to tempt me away from the excellence of NetNewsWire , but it might help Google Reader users stay on top of things more efficiently.

Google Reader Notifier is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .

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For the second year running, Whirlpool won the Best Technology Media Website at the Sun Microsystems IT Journalism Awards .

Whirlpool is (officially) Australia’s best broadband news and community forum site. Although it has strong links with the industry, it is staffed entirely by volunteers and enthusiasts.

It is an astonishing tribute to the power of an intelligent user community that it beat a number of competing commercial sites with professional full-time journalists and budgets in the hundreds of thousands, including ZDNet.com.au and CNet.com.au.

The awards ceremony was held in Sydney last Friday. I had the honour of accepting the award on behalf of the whole Whirlpool team and got to keep the trophy (temporarily), a beautiful bronze Frill-necked Lizard:

Disclaimer: I write for Whirlpool as a reporter.

When I first switched to Macs a few years ago, I found all the help and advice I needed in its Apple Mac forum , which is large enough to contain real experts and small enough to be friendly. I recommend it.

UPDATE: Here is a photo of me (courtesy of itjourno.com.au ) holding up the award in an unprofessional, enthusiast-like way so that the photographer can get a great action shot of the back of the framed award certificate :-)

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