I’m posting more and more reviews of applications to this site (a), and so far they’ve only been from Apple’s official App Store. But you can jailbreak your iPhone; jailbreaking allows you to massively expand the potential use of your iPhone, beyond the limited functionality currently granted by Apple. If you do decide to jailbreak, I’d recommend Pwnageto do so, following the tutorials at iClarified (b). You will gain you deeper access to not only the device’s hidden filesystem, but two more unofficial “app stores”, Cydia and Installer (c).
Most of the applications available in Cydia and Installer will not be allowed in the official App Store. They may contravene Apple’s (somewhat opaque) store policies, or run in the background, or not have a graphical interface, etc. The majority of applications are free. Many are ported Unix apps that are open source, and some are commercial applications. I’d like to highlight three free apps that I think are so good, it’s worth you taking the time to jailbreak your iPhone.
(1) Cycorder
Most phones have the capability to record video. For some reason, Apple has not included this in the iPhone and it is currently barred under the SDK. But the creator of Cydia – Jay Freeman (aka Saurik) – has created a great video recorder called Cycorder.
It has an easy interface, supported with some unobtrusive ads. And the results are excellent – there’s a demo video available at http://cache.saurik.com/cycorder.mov. Video is recorded at 6-15 frames per second, using MJPEG compression to output video in Quicktime .mov format, at a resolution of 384×288. Audio is also captured. In good light, I’ve recorded many superb little videos. In bad light, it suffers, but then the same is true of most phone video recorders when they are unlit.
The only somewhat tricky bit is getting the video off your phone. Currently you have to use another application, such as SSH or netatalk, to browse to /var/mobile/Media/Videos, then drag the movies off. This is not very user-friendly. However, the roadmap shows that the ability to share video via email and YouTube is coming within a couple of months.
So I’d thoroughly recommend Cycorder to add in the video recording functionality that should already be present in Apple’s flagship mobile device. Don’t just take my word for it though – it even gets the seal of approval from Apple co-founder Woz!
Tomorrow, I’ll take a look at PDAnet.
Notes:
(a) By the way, none of the reviews are or will be paid placements
(b) Please backup your phone first. Bear in mind it’s at your own risk, but in my experience, I’ve been able to restore phones from any firmware errors.
(c) Cydia has taken over from Installer as the de facto unofficial App Store, and has a far greater number of applications listed. It’s based on Debian’s APT, which is a long-established package manager.