You know, with the complete flood of email we all get each and every day, it’s hard to sort through and find the email from just the important folks in our lives. You can star emails, flag them, send them to special folders via arcane filtering rule sets, but it’s never been just dead simple to keep track of the folks that you really want to hear from, and weed those away from the rest of the onslaught of emails we all face daily.

Apple’s new OS X Mountain Lion has added a super easy way to do just that, however, and it matches its iOS counterpart fairly well. It’s called VIP, and boy is it simple to implement.

Reliving your childhood with retro games on iOS is, I find, one of the best ways to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon — until you get frustrated with the virtual controls that keep getting you killed and you threaten to throw your iPad out of the window. But thanks to the iCade 8-Bitty, a new Bluetooth control pad for iOS, you can now play your favorite titles with real controls.

The iPhone 5 has quickly become Apple’s fastest-selling iPhone of all-time, meaning it’s incredibly difficult to get hold of — even more than three weeks after its launch. And the situation is about to get a lot worse, according to Bloomberg. Apple has had to increase quality-control at Foxconn to prevent damaged devices with nicks and scratches from leaving the factory. As a result, iPhone 5 production rates have dropped.

If you create websites these days there are a few big players who dominate the field—WordPress (my fav), Drupal (my second choice), and Joomla (not one of my favs, but…)—and while all of them are pretty easy to get, they have their own quirks and tricks that you need to learn to get the most out of them. I should know, I write books on WordPress…

But I digress. The thing is that while making great sites isn’t hard, having some guidances to help you along makes things a lot easier. Hence…Learn To Build Websites With OSTraining: Get 1 Year Of Unlimited Access to Over 800 Online Tutorials That Will Teach You How to Use WordPress, Joomla & Drupal.

While I’ve been involved in a lot of start ups, I’ve never started one of my own. Frankly, I don’t think I’m really the entrepreneur type. Which is okay, because not everyone can (or should) be. That said, I do believe there is a lot to learn from the entrepreneur mindset and process.

One of the key parts to all businesses are gaining and understanding your customers. This, however, is something that alludes a lot of us. I’m thinking that this free ebook might be able to help—The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Enhanced Customer Development: This Free Ebook is a Must-Read for All Entrepreneurs.

Double Fine is putting several fantastic games on sale today, from Stacking and Brutal Legend on consoles to Iron Brigade on Steam.

But the best news of all is that the company has also dropped the price of one of the best games of all time, Psychonauts, to a mere five dollars. Well, $4.99 to be exact. How can this be?

Sure, Rovio just announced its new Star Wars Angry Bird iteration, but they certainly haven’t forgotten about the OG Angry Birds that started it all. Today, Rovio has updated the original Angry Birds with a ton of new content. Chock full of new power-ups, this update includes 15 new Surf & Turf levels as well as 15 pig themed levels.

In a letter to shareholders posted today on the Microsoft Investor website, Steve Ballmer, current CEO of Microsoft, said something surprising.

His comments in the annual letter suggest that Microsoft may take a page out of the Apple playbook and start building its own phones based on the upcoming Surface tablet PCs, similarly to the other hardware made by the Redmond-based tech giant, the XBox 360.

Apple’s much-maligned Maps app, released along with iOS 6, is an easy target, what with mixed up locations, cloud-obscured satellite images, and the infamous melting bridges. However, several developers have come forth to say that they had been warning Apple via reports on developer-only forums since the first beta came out at the beginning of June, 2012.

Some of these developers filed bug reports and sent e-mails to Apple employees as well, all about the poor performance of the upcoming Maps app in iOS 6.

“I posted at least one doomsayer rant after each (developer) beta, and I wasn’t alone,” one developer told CNET. “The mood amongst the developers seemed to be that the maps were so shockingly bad that reporting individual problems was futile. What was needed wasn’t so much an interface for reporting a single point as incorrect, but for selecting an entire region and saying ‘all of this — it’s wrong.'”

LifeProof has definitely made an impact with the digital outdoors; seems I run into their sleek, modular, waterproof iPhone cases everywhere (we love them, btw). Now, the company is focusing on their new Nüüd iPad case, and the second available accessory for the case is the LifeJacket, a flotation device that fits around the waterproof Nüüd case and keeps the iPad from sinking into the murky depths after you’ve, say, calculated your dive profile.

Major League Baseball has been thrilled with the success of Passbook. After integrating with the iOS 6 service only a couple weeks ago, MLB is already seeing 12% of its e-ticket buyers opt for using digital passes on their iPhones.

It doesn’t look like Apple is going to be making its own dock for the iPhone 5 and its new Lightning connector. You could go the third-party route and order something like this unofficial Lightning Dock from TLD, or you could get creative and use Legos.

There’s a 42-peice Lego set available online that’s specifically designed to create a minimalistic dock for the iPhone 5, and it looks awesome.

Apple is widely expected to unveil the rumored ‘iPad mini’ at a press event this month, with many speculating that event invites will be sent to the press as soon as tomorrow, October 10th. The mythical 7-inch tablet will likely be priced between $200-$250 and target competition like the Google Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire. Apple has been poised to enter the cheaper tablet market for quite some time, and the company has reportedly started manufacturing an upwards of 10 million units to sell this holiday season.

A new report today claims that the iPad mini will be Wi-Fi-only, unlike the current third-gen iPad that can operate on 3G and 4G carrier networks. Apple is also expected to unveil an updated version of the current third-gen iPad with 4G support in the U.K. and the new Lighting dock.

I hope you haven’t grown tired of dismembering the undead because Gameloft plans on unleashing another horde of zombies onto Android an iOS this Halloween. You’ll soon have the opportunity to play the part of Stuntman/Movie Star extraordinaire, aimed with ridding the entertainment capital of the world of walking corpses (and I’m not talking Joan Rivers). Arm yourself with weapons sporting wacky names like “Widow Maker” and the “Cyclops,” then annihilate anything without a pulse (pretty much all of Hollywood).

One of the things that was fantastic about vintage PCs is the way your hands never had to leave the keyboard: everything was just a command away. The graphic user interface first introduced to the world with the Macintosh is obviously a big step forward when it comes to general accessibility, pointing an onscreen at an object to click on it can often be a step backwards when it comes to speed for die-hard power users.

If that sounds like you, Shortcat is a new, free app that you should download which aims to bring the command line to the GUI.

So, you know how to take a panorama photo with your new iPhone 5, right? Launch the Camera app, tap Options, then Panorama, and then point it at something suitably panoramic. An arrow appears on the left side of the iPhone 5’s screen, and you tap the shutter button, keeping the arrow centered between the two lines as you move your camera from left to right.

Guess what, though? You can do the very same thing from right to left. Revolutionary!

Speculating in vintage computers isn’t exactly the same as putting money into a blue chip. Here’s the proof: a rare Apple I being sold at auction at Christie’s has just failed to make its minimum bid of 50,000 British pounds (or about $80,000), despite the fact that a similar machine sold for $374,500 in June.

Back in early April, I got to review the Retrospective 5 messenger-style camera bag from Think Tank Photo.

I loved it.

But you know how it is; using something for several months offers a lot more perspective than merely reviewing it for one or two weeks. So I decided to give the Think Tank Retrospective 5 another look, and with six months of use under my belt, I’m ready to tell you how it’s really performed.

Greg Pierce, the genius behind Drafts for the iPhone and iPad, has posted a teaser screenshot for a new feature in an upcoming version of the app. To save you puzzling it out from the picture, it gives you the chance to send pre-defined emails to pre-set addresses, with one click.

MonoPhix is a two-dollar black-and-white photography app for iPhone, with a separate companion MonoPhix HD version for iPad. Although it produces good results, MonoPhix suffers from some odd design choices that make it a disappointing and frustrating experience.

Some design changes to the new iPad Mini that was revealed via photos of leaked parts has halted the production of iPad Mini cases of at least one major case manufacturer. We’ve seen numerous cases and physical mockups of the rumored iPad Mini, so it’s not clear which changes have caused the production delays.

According to Japanese site Macotakara, a large OEM mobile accessory maker noticed that the round shape of the iPad Mini has changed and they may have to drop their designs based on leaked iPad Mini parts.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro has been rumored to be in production phases recently, but we’ve yet to see any reasonable leaks of the new Apple laptop. According to a new report though, the 13-inch MacBook Pros with Retina display are indeed on the way, and they should be in mass production sometime in the fourth quarter of 2012.

It’s not clear when the new MacBook will hit stores, but analyst Richard Shim of DisplaySearch speculates that it should be released sometime after the iPad Mini announcement that is rumored to take place on October 17th.

Text editor groupies of the world, gather round. I have something new to show you.

Clean Writer Pro is a newcomer to the OS X text scene, and offers a lot of the basics for a very good price: and right now, it’s on sale for a dollar.

Researchers in the UK have put together a prototype wrist-worn sensor that turns your own hand into a 3D movement controller for almost any device you can think of.

Experts from Newcastle University and the Cambridge-based Microsoft Research used off-the-shelf parts to assemble a sensor that straps to your wrist and detects movement of your arm, hand and fingers. There’s no need for any external sensor, nor for line-of-sight to the device you’re controlling. Everything’s done using the technology you wear.

Here’s a video that explains more.

Buying a whole set of new Lightning cables to replace the 30-pin connector cables we’ve been using for years has left a lot of iPhone 5 feeling a little bit blue. No one wants to spend $100 to buy five new cables, but cheap Chinese knock-offs have seemed out of reach thanks to the authenticator chip Apple’s used in the new data cables.

Hope has risen though, as clever Chinese hackers announced today that they’ve been able to successfully clone Apple’s Lightning Authenticator Chip, paving the way for cheaper third-party Lightning cables and accessories.