We have been hearing the term jail breaking for a while and most of us knew what does that mean. For those who are not aware, jail breaking is nothing but a synonym for hacking, that enables our device to use third party software, which is not officially promoted by Apple. Today, Jail breaking has become one of the hot topics and there are enough jail breakers to provide us a solution for using third party software in our iPhone and iPOD touch devices. One such software that recently came into the market is Cydia
Cydia is a software installer for jail broken iPhone OS, an alternate to installer.app and can be used straightforward. This software was released by Jay Freeman few days back.
Cydia application installer already includes applications like Cycoder that turns the iPhone into a camcorder, and PdaNet, which turns the iPhone into a Wi-Fi hotspot, using the data connection. You can have the review of this software here.
Following the release of this software, the Cydia Store was launched on Saturday, 07th March 2009 where individual developers can sell their applications for jail broken iPhone and iPOD Touch devices outside Apple’s ‘Walled Garden’ – the App Store.
Freeman in his interview to the Wall Street Journal said that the intention of the Cydia store is to charge not more than the commission Apple does for his site’s billing services. This indeed is great news for all the individual developers as they are a promising to charge an affordable amount. It was also reported that two more rival App Stores are under development of which one focuses on selling porn-themed games for the iPhone.
Freeman’s Cyntact is the first paid package in the Cydia Store. Cyntact is a cool application that shows the contact’s profile picture in the contact list.This application is completely free from using DRM (Digital rights management) and is sold for just 1$. Also Freeman says that he does not intend to make a habit of charging for little packages like Cyntact in the future. His plan is to continue releasing most of my work for free. However, Cyntact faces some conflict with the IntelliScreen app and there is also a considerable amount of time delay in loading the contacts list after installing the application.
CC Image Credit : Six Steps