SugarSync, Dropbox, and Box.net all have several things in common. They're freemium cloud-syncing services that let you upload files to download again elsewhere; they all have free apps for BlackBerry, iPhone, and Android smartphones; and they're all featured in this week's episode of Tap That App.

Check out our video to see how one of these apps could solve your storage problems.

Originally posted at Dialed In

When Audible.com rolled out its iPhone app earlier this year, the big complaint was that you couldn't browse the Audible store or buy audiobooks on the fly. You could access your existing library of purchases, but for new stuff, you had to stop by your PC.

Not anymore. Audible 1.3 provides access to a new mobile store, where you can browse and search Audible's catalog of more than 85,000 audiobooks. See something you like? Buy it or add it to your wish list on the spot.

(To actually download books, however, you need to be connected to a Wi-Fi hot spot--understandable given that the files can be dozens of megabytes or larger.)

There's just one little wrinkle: This mobile store isn't built into the app itself. Instead, tapping the Enter the Mobile Store button dumps you out of the app and into Safari, which is where all the store action takes place.

It's a minor hassle, but a hassle all the same. Given that the iOS supports in-app purchases, I'm not sure why Audible deployed the mobile store this way. On the other hand, Amazon's Kindle app works the same way, and Amazon owns Audible. Hmmm.

Other than that, the Audible app rocks. You can sort your library by title, author, or recent additions, include iTunes-purchased audiobooks in your library (a nice little convenience), and read Audible-related news.

I particularly like the smart player controls, which include a 30-second rewind button, a sleep timer (any 15-minute increment up to 60 minutes), a Facebook/Twitter sharing option, and a full-screen, button-free interface that's much safer for listening in the car.

The Audible service itself is a longtime favorite of mine, with plans starting at $14.95 per month (a price that includes one audiobook credit and big discounts on purchases). That said, I'd love to see some kind of unlimited-listening option a la Tales2Go or Rhapsody.

Anyway, if you're an Audible subscriber (or an audiobook fan) and an iPhone/iPod/iPad owner, you'll absolutely positively want to grab the new app.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Firefox for Mac OS X hadn't been Mozilla's top priority in the feverish race to give a hardware boost to the task of drawing Web pages on a screen, but it looks as if the technology will arrive in time for Firefox 4.

Windows not only is more widely used than Mac OS X but also is where Microsoft has been touting its hardware-accelerated IE9 work. So it wasn't a great surprise that Mozilla's first work for hardware acceleration arrived there. But yesterday, the organization decided to try to squeeze in some Mac acceleration just before a critical Firefox 4 deadline.

The next Firefox beta, the seventh, is set to be the last for the addition of new features. This feature-freeze stage is essential to give enough debugging time to meet the planned 2010 release of Firefox 4.

It's not certain the acceleration for the Mac will make it. Mozilla programmers decided to build it into the developer versions of Firefox released nightly for more testing then reconvene later this week to decide how to proceed.

Firefox's Windows version includes some hardware acceleration using Microsoft's Direct3D 9 graphics interface, with Direct3D 10 support on the way. The Mac version uses a competing interface, OpenGL, that's not as well-supported on Windows.

There are different ways to enable hardware acceleration; Firefox also is working on using another Windows interface called Direct2D that among other things can improve font display through hardware acceleration. The two approaches show up at different stages of producing a Web page; Direct2D comes later in the process.

Why use hardware acceleration? Performance.

"We expect this to provide a lot of benefit for some currently quite slow pages," according to Mozilla's Tuesday planning meeting notes. It can help with various mathematically intense operations, such as converting video from its encoded color description to the red-green-blue values needed to display on screen. It can also speed image, video, text, and vector graphics resizing. It can be used to assemble--or "composite"--elements of a Web page into a whole. And with the world of 3D Web graphics enabled by WebGL, graphics acceleration is essential.

Unfortunately, though, it's not a panacea. Mozilla programmers are concerned that their testing shows many pages load more slowly: On the organization's Tp4 test, which loads 100 top Web pages 10 times each, turning on OpenGL layers in Firefox for the Mac slowed performance 10 percent. That's down to 6 percent now, but that's still worrisome for a feature designed to improve performance.

Originally posted at Deep Tech