Enter AppVee, the largest reviewer of iPhone apps on the web, who also happen to be celebrating their one-year app-versary on the web, after a busy year of bringing you in-depth video reviews of over 1,000 different apps. AppVee saves you the time, effort and scrolling-induced thumb injuries of scouring the App Store, and brings you only the best of the best, whether you are after productivity helpers or games to kill those empty moments on long subway commutes.

Every fresh app that is released is evaluated against a set of criteria. If the application is worthwhile, AppVee goes to work developing a comprehensive video review, a written review (which you should definitely check out their website for), alongside detailed screenshots, providing additional and valuable information on new releases. With such an industrious approach to regularly reviewing apps, I sometimes find myself wondering if Alex and the guys have time for anything else! Just check out this video review of Tweetie (which happens to be one of my fave and most-used apps):

While I sometimes enjoy cruising the most recent apps available through the App Store just for comic value (because really, just how paranoid do you need to be in order to pay for an app that maps terror organizations across the globe?!), it’s beyond helpful to have a resource such as AppVee right at my fingertips. With a recently released iPhone app of their own, AppVee are true mobile life-savers.

To keep up with the latest news from AppVee, be sure to check out the AppVee Studio on 5min, or follow them on Twitter!

When The Cult of iPod took the world by storm in late 2001, suddenly all of my extreme and tedious efforts were rendered useless – the world’s population had made the migration to individual MP3s, and music libraries left at the mercy of the shuffle. The secret to surviving this brave new world, once you get past your jewel case inhibitions? Smart tags, with which you could easily look up and find music in your collection – no matter how deep you buried it, easily create playlists according to genre, artist, album, year or just about anything else. And how could we forget the glorious vanity of skimming through your iTunes albums’ artwork?

However, people don’t walk around toting baskets filled with goodies, and life ain’t exactly a picnic – sometimes, even tags are missing in action when you desperately need them. Sure, you could – in theory – spend hours or possibly days manually fixing all those missing tags in your iTunes stash, but come on, this is the 21st century we’re in. Enter FixTunes, and you’ve got yourself a sweet little solution that mostly does the job.

FixTunes is completely automated, meaning you don’t need to overwork your fingers by typing, and is quite flexible, allowing you to either go song by song and approve the new information it locates for your tracks and albums, or to just sit back and let the magic happen. Of course, nothing’s perfect – this will become clear when you try to look up information for covers or remixes of original tracks, or bands who are pretty much doomed to obscurity, but all in all, this is a sweet deal. To work some Mary Poppins magic on your iTunes collection, just check out this handy video tutorial from VitaminCM.com:

Go forth an catalog your tunes, kids! Got Mac tips or playlist suggestions? Drop us a line via email or comment on this post.

MobileMe is a subscription-based collection of online services and software from Apple, the latest generational upgrade to Apple’s veteran iTools. MobileMe’s focus is – of course – the Apple junkies who simply have to sync their respective Geek Gear: their Mac, their iPhone and iPod Touch. MobileMe allows you to get it together, and keep it together, allowing your email, contacts, and calendar stay the same wherever you check them, no matter what device you use, as well as keep it all in sync across multiple devices. You can also set up your MobileMe account to use a personal domain name, so that the URL to any iWeb ’08 (or later) website that you publish to MobileMe is easy to remember. You can also choose to change the “CNAME record” on your registrar’s site, as described here.

With this handy video from Understand Your Mac, we’ll learn how to set your domain up with MobileMe as well as how to edit the cName in GoDaddy (other domain name providers are likely to be similar, but not exactly the same):

Got life-changing tips for Mac users? Advice for the iPhone-toting over-achiever? Tricks to turn the iPod Touch into our faithful little lapdog? We’d love to hear all about it – drop us a line, and your awesome how-to’s may be featured right here on our blog!

However, there are times when I’m either feeling lenient and tolerant enough towards the musical tastes of friends and colleagues, or end up feeling optimistically curious to a degree that pushes me outside of my iTunes stash, and into the loving arms of other people’s musical bounties, courtesy of iTunes’ sharing capabilities.

This time, with the recent release of iTunes 8.1, Apple have revved things up by introducing iTunes DJ, the older and hotter sister of its predecessor, Party Shuffle. The iTunes DJ feature allows your tech-forward pals toting an iPhone or the iPod Touch (so long as you grant them entry to your Wi-Fi network) to request and vote for songs to be added to the iTunes DJ playlist (which greatly resembles the party shuffle playlist you’re already familiar with). The more votes a song racks up, the higher it will climb in the coolness hierarchy within your iTunes playlist, and the sooner it will play.

While a tad inconvenient for ultra-paranoid types or really anyone with an encrypted wi-fi network, the only real requirement is that your pals all sport the Remote iPhone app, which can be downloaded free of charge from the iTunes Store.

To set up iTunes DJ and get the party started, you first need to open iTunes on your Mac and click on the Settings button underneath the iTunes DJ playlist. In the settings window that opens, check the box to allow guests to request songs, and even type in a welcome message warning them not to push it with The Jonas Brothers tracks. You can also check the little box to enable voting, and then sit back to watch (and hear/possible groove to) democracy in motion.

The highlight of this feature for musical snobs and chronic playlist patrollers and no doubt a huge draw for control freaks is the fact that while the owner of the iTunes-paired iPhone will blossom into a musical tyrant with a ability to pause, skip and play the hell out of a given playlist, guests (those less fortunate ones whose iPhones are only satellites revolving around the Party Master, but not paired to the host) will be able to rock the vote, but not the actual order or behavior of the playlist.

That said, guests can still put their music where their mouth is, and vote for songs, request new songs, which will be added to the bottom of the playlist. You, the power-hungry Party Master, are a different class altogether – you can balance out all this democracy-shmemocracy by repeatedly casting multiple votes for the song of your choice (just right-click on the tune of your choice and let your voice be heard!), unlike your guests who will only be able to vote once for a given tune.

Of course, all of this is just fantasy unless you’re equipped with friends who are total Apple fanboys, because we all know that no matter how pumping, it ain’t no party if the guest list includes only you and your iPhone. On the other hand, do you really want to hang out with folks who are still using Zune?!

My first pick is Plex, an awesome user interface freebie for Mac that provides instant access to your media – television shows, movies, music… even the weather looks fascinating on Plex. Based on the XBMC open-source media centre originally designed for the Xbox, Plex may just be the most useful infusion for any Mac owners who use their Macs as an entertainment hub. At our place, a Mac Mini hooked up to a frighteningly huge LCD screen serves as our ever-obedient media center, so Plex was a perfect fit. This beautiful behemoth of a media center is currently available only for OS X, which is really the only bummer I could spot, but hey, you didn’t need me to tell you that PC users are losing out, right?

A great (and again, FREE) alternative to Front Row (which I was using before), Plex has completely upgraded my home entertainment setup. Plex can play a wide range of video, audio and photo formats, but the real prize here are its dynamic library features, which allow you to catalog your media as a collection of versatile libraries, automatically retrieve metadata from the Internet, and display your libraries using one of the visually stunning skins. The skins are hypnotizing, really – I stared at a hi-res image of a tellie set thrown in a field of tall grass for about an hour before proceeding to click “Play” on my little Apple Remote. Plex includes a thoroughly customizable skinning engine that enables users to alter its entire user interface. Colors, controls, navigation, positioning of elements, animation, and even added functionality can all be achieved with a skin, which also makes Plex a great display for the easily bored and interface-picky.

The icing on the cake? With Plex, you can now automatically download movie and TV show artwork, fan-art, plot and episode information for your movies and television shows, as well as artwork, artist and album information for your music files. How awesome is that? My secret infatuation with Gossip Girl is now out of the closet thanks to Plex’s beautiful features, which I just couldn’t bear to hide away from house guests… Darned be Plex! Watch out, Upper East Siders – here I come!

But seriously, if you own a Mac, you absolutely need to be using Plex.
For more handy Mac tips and tricks, check out 5min’s Tech Files.

Several events led to me finally forking over the cash and getting my talons on the most hyped mobile device to date, none of which have much to do with mobile technology or extreme dissatisfaction with my former Nokia. In fact, it was a Garage Geeks event I attended last week which finally dropped the Apple anvil on me: surrounded by tech-forward geeks and early adopters, when it was time to exchange digits as a part of the familiar networking circuit, I was simply mortified to whip out my Nokia and hold it for all the world to see. It simply didn’t cut it.

The second reason was that this past week, in a frantic hunt for a killer outfit to wear to a wedding (too bad Rob and Corinne of Threadbanger can’t be my personal fashion designers!), I nearly bought a dress for more than the cost of an iPhone…So I found myself wondering, if you were willing to cough up that much cash for a piece of fabric with a few sequins on it, why not spend it on something a little more durable than that?!

And so, ladies and gents, I may have lost on a drop-dead gorgeous dress by label Rhus Ovata, but I am now the master of my own mobile destiny.

Once again, working at 5min proved to be super-handy as I made my way through “iPhone Newbie” territory, and I’m not just talking about the fact that now I can unlock iPhones in my sleep: all I had to do was turn to Four20’s iPhone Studio. This dude’s got it down, and has videos spanning almost every iPhone application I’ve encountered, from Graffiti to iBlackjack.

Check out this video, for example, showing how to sync music to your iPhone from different computers:

I can already smell the sweet whiff of the iPhone SDK…