Evite (Free) – The biggest player in the online invitation sending arena, the Evite app mirrors the tried and true functionality of its hugely popular website. Part guest list and part social network, once you’ve created your invitation from their robust supply of graphics and styles and sent it out using their guest management system, you’ll be able to watch as friends and family reply and comment in real time. The design is clean and easy to use, and the app will push notifications to your iPhone or iPad even when it’s not running (if you ask it to), so you can stay on top of your event all the way up until the doorbell rings.

Simple Soiree ($1.99) – Most definitely the best professional help you’re going to be able to get for under two dollars, Simple Soiree is the product of famous party planner Liza Rivera Salta’s years of experience. In this app you’ll find her personal method laid out for you to take advantage of, breaking up the tough job of hosting into a number of manageable steps with associated to-do lists. Guests, decor, food and entertainment; once you’ve seen all of these aspects separated and organized, you’ll be able to conquer them one by one and let the app prompt you on what to tackle next. Were that not enough, Simple Soiree will export these lists (such as your menu or to-dos) into classy looking HTML documents that you can print out to have on hand come shopping or party time.

Event Planner, Checklist & Countdown ($.99) – Extreme organization is the name of the game with the less-than-succinctly titled Event Planner, Checklist & Countdown. With features as robust as its name, this app excels at giving you the ability to create and manage multiple task lists associated with planning and budgeting a big event, as well as assign timetables and priority levels to every step along the way. Manage as many events as you want, and set reminders and countdowns for each one to keep you on track.

Punchbowl (Free) – Punchbowl.com is an extremely comprehensive party planning website with enough features to help plan just about any event, large or small. It does everything you’d immediately expect, such as manage contacts and RSVPs, and sort out local vendors who have the supplies you’ll need to get entertaining. It also has a number of interactive features, such as polling your guests on menu items, requesting food or financial contributions, or hosting photos and message boards tied to your get-together. Unfortunately, the Punchbowl app is fairly stripped down (it tracks your guest list and not much else) and will mostly just point you back to their site. Still, both are free and worth checking out.

Instagram (Free) – After all the hard work you put in planning it, the last thing you want to do is let your party go undocumented. Pick a cute color filter that best suits the mood of your party and then start flashing pics. Instagram will upload unlimited photos live to your online stream (as well as to Facebook, Twitter, or other social media outlets) so that everyone who couldn’t make it can follow along as if they were there.

And if you want to make sure that everyone actually shows up, you’d better have some delicious eats to feed your hungry guests. If you need help deciding what to serve (or figuring out how to cook it), be sure to check out this rundown of our favorite iPhone & iPad cooking apps. Don’t worry, we included a great app for picking drinks, too!

Alexei Bochenek is a lifelong tech nerd & film buff based in Los Angeles. When he’s not playing with his phone, it’s because the movie has started. Shhhhh!

Wunderlist for iPhone (Free) & Wunderlist HD for iPad (Free) – This clean, simple app sets out to do one thing and it does it well: make lists. Title your list and then get to adding entries on it. Each entry gets a name, a space for additional notes, a due date, a priority rating (a star to say if it’s extra special) and an optional reminder to be sent via in-phone notification or e-mail at a user-defined time. Sounds easy, right? That’s the point! Sort by list, overall priority, due date, or overdue items and then get to checking them off.  What makes Wunderlist additionally great is that it creates an account for you that constantly syncs, and your lists are accessible via just about every platform or standard web browser.

TaskCurrent (Free) – It’s hard to build a to-do list aimed at achieving a certain goal if you don’t actually know what to do along the path to that goal. That’s where TaskCurrent comes in, which maker Comitify Corp. calls a “Superhub for Advice.” You start by picking an aspect of your life that you’d like to improve or introduce for the first time, which the app calls a “stream.” This could be related to personal improvement, like getting fit or learning a new skill, or be related to a more social goal, like exploring the city more or showing affection to a loved one. Then TaskCurrent will begin to send you helpful tips, advice, and motivational quotes, doled out over time in order to keep you on task. Sometimes it just takes a nudge to send you down a stream towards your goal.

Evernote (Free) – List are all well and good, but sometimes you need a more robust format to pack in all your information than just a row of bullet points. Enter Evernote, a deceptively huge app that aims to be a virtual file cabinet for all of the notes, text, images and other assorted information that you just can’t let go of. Record voice notes or snap photos, copy pages from the web, or build lists within your notes and Evernote will organize them into “notebooks” that correspond to all of your individual projects. Like Wunderlist, Evernote creates an account for you and syncs everything back to their servers where you can access it from a variety of different platforms as well as the web.

Packing ($.99) – Going someplace? Don’t forget to put “Install Packing” on your to-do list, as this app is extremely handy for any frequent traveller. Build lists focused on what you’ll need on any given trip, separated by categories such as ‘clothes,’ ‘toiletries,’ and ‘gadgets’ for quick access. Then assign those items weights and monetary values, both important aspects to consider when it’s all going in a bag on your back and then off into the woods.

Penultimate ($.99) – When words fail you, there’s sketching app Penultimate. Crack open a fresh notebook and go to town sketching out your thoughts and plans in your own handwriting. Import photos to draw over and to enhance your notes, or buy additional paper types for special diagramming or music composition. Because it’s virtual, there is never another blank page waiting for additional notes. Just don’t let your next to-do list span so many pages that you never see the first items again.

Alexei Bochenek is a lifelong tech nerd & film buff based in Los Angeles. When he’s not playing with his phone, it’s because the movie has started. Shhhhh!

Lose It! (Free) – Before you start thinking about workout routines, Lose It! is here to help you monitor, log, and track your caloric intake so that you know where you stand. Just tell it what you eat or scan the barcodes of the foods you’re consuming and watch it build you a profile based on your diet. Then start setting goals and sticking to them, thanks to a social networking aspect which enables you to compare, compete, and find support from your friends.

MyFitnessPal (Free) – Another major player in the calorie counting app scene, MyFitnessPal offers many of the same functions as Lose It! but with an interface of its own. Because this app also links in to its own social network, the calorie counter you choose may depend on which your friends prefer. Since they’re free, why not download them both and see who is more active on which app?

Fooducate (Free) – Dig deeper into the pros and cons of your dietary decisions with Fooducate. Also equipped with a barcode scanner, Fooducate will follow you down the aisles at the supermarket and let you know what preservatives, fats, sugars and other additives are lurking within your (formerly) favorite foods. Thanks to the familiar school-style grading system (A+ to F), studying up on what you’re about to eat just got easy.

iMapMyRun (Free) – If you’re feeling healthy and ready to hit the road running, iMapMyRun will follow you every step of the way. This app tracks your route, mapping it out live and saving it for review later. It will also keep an eye on distance, elevation, speed and calories burned, so you can analyze your effort and step it up the next time you set out on another trip. It will even integrate with a number of heart-rate monitoring attachments for your iPhone, if you just can’t get enough data. Prefer the thrill of two wheels? There’s an app for cyclists, too: iMapMyRide (also free).

JEFIT (free) – If it’s muscle building that’s on your mind, you’ll probably be seeing a lot more of the gym in the near future. With JEFIT, you can focus all your energy on making big gains and leave the workout planning and progress tracking to your phone. Just pick some exercises from the app’s extensive library of workouts, mark down your reps and weights, and let the app track your progress and automatically mark down your personal records. You can even snap quick photos for comparison over time, along with the custom charts and graphs that JetFit will generate for you.

Zombies, Run! ($7.99) – If talk of fitness alone is enough to make you tired, don’t give up on getting in shape just yet. Make an adventure out of exercising with Zombies, Run!, a creative iPhone game that integrates athletics into the experience. You’ve survived an undead apocalypse, but you won’t last long just standing around. Get your headphones on and take a guided audio tour of the end times as daywalkers nip at your heels all across town. With over 30 missions to survive and a unique system of achievement-based rewards, you’ll be picking up the pace in no time; or you’ll lose the part of your brain that cares about weekends at the beach, anyway.

Alexei Bochenek is a lifelong tech nerd & film buff based in Los Angeles. When he’s not playing with his phone, it’s because the movie has started. Shhhhh!

The apparent key to mobile success: asynchronicity. Draw Something, like the popular Scrabble-clone Words With Friends, has perfected the art of multiplayer gaming that you can do alone, on your own schedule. Think playing chess by mail, but…not boring. You draw your picture, send it out, and wait for a reply. And while you’re waiting, you’ve got all of the rest of your friends, apps, and the entirety of the internet to keep you entertained. Because the game is turn-based, you can knock out your picture whenever you have a free minute, lending you the feeling of complete control over the experience. There’s no timer ticking down to add pressure, nor do you have to worry about scheduling issues when you agree to start a game. In fact, you can agree to start as many games with as many friends as you’d like, and pepper your day with sporadic bits of gaming that suit your personal taste.

Don’t think this asynchronous lifestyle is some fad. A quick look into other popular trends reveals that as technology advances, one of our favorite uses for it is stopping and starting time at our own whim. Watching TV in real time has become a thing of the past, thanks to TiVos and DVRs. Text messaging is overtaking live phone calls. And the biggest indicator of our budding love affair with asynchronicity: Facebook, where you can interact with everyone you know all at once…even while they’re asleep.

Alexei Bochenek is a lifelong tech nerd & film buff based in Los Angeles. When he’s not playing with his phone, it’s because the movie has started. Shhhhh!

Facebook (Free) – The reigning undisputed champion of social networking, it would be unfair to leave Facebook out of the discussion, even though you probably already know about it. Not only are Facebook’s built-in features such as event planning and photo sharing elaborate and well executed, but the near-limitless amount of apps and custom settings allow you to use this service exactly how you want, even if that’s completely different than the person next to you. And considering that the Mark Zuckerberg-led giant just dropped one billion dollars on photo-sharing app Instagram, this big blue internet powerhouse shows no sign of slowing down.

Foursquare (Free) – Your mobile phone has a GPS in it, so put it to work by signing up for Foursquare. This app lets you virtually “check in” to any physical location you visit, from bars and restaurants to shops, concert venues and more. See what your friends have been up to and broadcast your location so that they can meet up with you later. To help you remember to reach in your pocket activate the app, Foursquare will let you know about local deals and recommend you new places based on where you and your friends spend your time.

GroupMe (Free) – While social networks are great for keeping in touch in the long term, sometimes you need to send a quick message to a select crew of people and be sure it got to them. Enter text messaging, and the handy texting app GroupMe. Assign any combination of your contacts to a single text message chain and engage them in a group chat with ease. An indispensable service for making plans together or keeping track of everyone at a crowded event, it’s amazing this simple concept isn’t a regular feature of modern smartphones.

Highlight (Free) – When you’re out on the move, Highlight is taking notice of not only what you’re doing and who you’re nearby but might not be noticing. This clever app is always studying you and other Highlight users, and letting you know when your friends and potential friends are someplace close. To entice you into being a bit more social than you may otherwise be, it will drop hints about what makes these otherwise anonymous passersby worth your time, like letting you know you were actually at the same event or are into the same hobbies. Though it sounds a tad stalkery, they take extra pains to make sure it’s safe and fun, and an entirely opt-in experience. And unlike Foursquare, it’s less concerned with what you want to do than who you should be doing it with.

GetGlue (Free) – Like Foursquare for mass media entertainment, GetGlue for iPad will help you keep track of more than just a few of your favorite things, such as TV shows, movies, music, and books. Then the app will share your list of what you’re currently into with everyone in your network, so they can follow along. Use it to see what you have in common, and to check your friends’ accounts for their personal recommendations. GetGlue will get in on the action as well, noting your likes and dislikes and using its recommendation engine to fill you in on what you’ve been missing.

Turntable.fm (Free) – It’s club night in the comfort of your own home (or office, or headphones on the bus…) when you jump into a Turntable.fm room with all of your buds and listen live to your favorite tunes as a group. Like a private radio station, everyone listening gets to take turns picking the music, and you can rate the current DJ’s performance by bobbing your avatar’s head and throwing out a thumbs-up.

Now that you’ve got all of these friends and you’ve lined up every wavelength of your collective hive-mind, maybe you can all collaborate on the next great iPhone app?

Alexei Bochenek is a lifelong tech nerd & film buff based in Los Angeles. When he’s not playing with his phone, it’s because the movie has started. Shhhhh!