One of Gmail's most ballyhooed features is its excellent spam filter. But having reduced spam annoyance to a dull roar, Google has moved on to another troubling inbox management issue: even "legitimate" e-mail contains plenty of both wheat and chaff. Google's latest Gmail feature, dubbed Priority Inbox, aims to make inbox management a bit easier. Through its own analysis and your manual training (much like you would train a spam filter), Priority Inbox learns which messages are more likely to require immediate attention, and which can wait. The feature splits your Inbox into "important and unread" messages, "starred" messages, and "everything else." Google says it will roll out the new option to users of Gmail and Google Apps alike over the coming days. We'll see how it works when it appears in our accounts.

Over at Macworld, Lex Friedman spends more than 1,000 words talking about video codecs. But it's not all nerd-speak. MPEG LA has announced that it will never charge royalties for free H.264 videos. That's important because HTML5 video, which lets you watch Web video without requiring plug-ins like Flash, is currently difficult for publishers and consumers alike, with different browsers providing limited support for different codecs. While H.264 - which Apple already supports in both Safari and Mobile Safari - already has buy-in from major media companies like CNN, Major League Baseball, and YouTube, this announcement could very well spark a unification of HTML5 video formats.

The attentive folks over at Patently Apple have uncovered an application Apple filed with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office for a Smart Bicycle System. Patently Apple compares the potential device to the Nike+iPod kit, geared towards cyclists instead of runners. The bicycle system would monitor all sorts of measurements - speed, distance, elevation and so on - all measured with sensors in an iPhone, the bike, or both. The patent - and Patently Apple's analysis of it - is exquisitely detailed, and worth a look for cycling enthusiasts and Apple fans alike.