As all movie-makers know, if you want to put butts in the seats, you need splashy special effects. Like, say, an explosive missile strike or an alien attack. And who doesn’t love a massive car crash? Bad Robot Interactive’s Action Movie FX 2.0 lets you add Hollywood-style effects sequences to the movies you shoot on …

How many times have you played a really sweet game on an Android or iOS device, but found yourself wishing for better controls? Because, let’s face it, some games really suffer when your thumbs block the screen, or when you don’t get any tactile feedback. Tapping glass is a far cry from mashing buttons. Enter ThinkGeek’s iCade 8-Bitty, a mobile …

Kids and iPads go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Unfortunately, kids are often covered in chocolate and peanut butter, meaning your very expensive tablet may end up the same way. Likewise, rugrats don’t have the best motor skills, so there’s a good chance your very expensive tablet will go crashing to the floor on more than one occasion. A …

Like any parent, I prize the Picasso-caliber works of art my kids create at school and around the house. Alas, I don’t own a warehouse, so I simply don’t have room to store all these masterpieces. What am I supposed to do, throw them in the trash? The guilt! The guilt! Now there’s an app for that: Art My Kid …

Most iPhone cases serve exactly one purpose: to protect your iPhone. Occasionally you find one that can pull kickstand duty as well, or perhaps open a beer bottle or add a tripod mount. The ReadyCase includes, among other things, a clip for keeping your earbuds close and tangle-free. ReadyCase Pbbblllttt. Indiegogo project ReadyCase offers seven handy tools in one iPhone …

Still printing photos at home? That’s a pricey blend of printer ink, photo paper, and iffy output quality. Of course, you can use any number of apps to upload photos to your nearest Walgreens, Costco, or the like, but then you’re looking a car ride — and have you seen gas prices lately? For a cheaper, more convenient way to …

The iPhone 5 may have a bigger screen, but text still looks pretty small to my aging eyes. In fact, it looks that way on all my iDevices. That’s because iOS relies on a fixed font size, and while a smattering of apps let you increase that size, there’s no “font” option to be found in iOS settings. Actually, there …

One of the features I was secretly hoping to see in the iPhone 5: induction-powered battery charging. This already exists in the form of third-party products like the Powermat and Energizer Qi. Alas, Apple missed a chance to wow the world, catch up with smartphones like the Lumia 820 and 920, and perhaps distract from the massive disappointment that is …

Remember the PalmPilot? Remember how it synced all your contacts to either Palm Desktop or Outlook? That was pretty nice. If you’re a Windows user, there’s no such desktop option for managing your iPhone address book. Sure, it gets backed up when you sync with iTunes, but there’s no way to view or edit all those contacts. Your only real …

You know the old saying: you can never be too rich or too thin, or have too much battery power for your Android phone. If you’re forever running low on juice, you’ve probably thought about packing along a spare battery — but that’s a hassle. Not only do you need a way to keep it charged, you also need a …