As previously reported, users of jailbroken phones and the developers who cater to them now have an avenue for commerce in apps: the Cydia Store. Smoking Apples visits the store and has a solid rundown, noting that Amazon Payments is the only funding source for the moment (PayPal is on the way, says Cydia lead Saurik/Jay Freeman). Users who update to the latest version of Cydia on their phones get the store capability automatically; if your phone isn't already jailbroken, though, you'll have to jailbreak it and install Cydia.

The limited number of apps on the store versus the overwhelming bounty of the official App Store may help users find the apps they truly want, says SA. Freeman has a list of apps queued up for release over the next few weeks before he begins accepting unsolicited submissions.

If the functionality you want and need is uncertain or unlikely to show up in the App Store (*ahem* -- tethering, anyone?), would you jailbreak your phone and buy from the Cydia Store?

While we're pondering the consequences of RIM announcing that programs in the Blackberry "App World" must be at least $2.99US, there are alternatives to the iTunes App Store emerging from the jailbreak side of the iPhone world. The Wall Street Journal reports that Cydia is making the transition from package repository to a full app store. There are also plans for an adult-only app store and a new jailbreak service.

The big question at the moment is how will Apple take this? Apple filed a complaint with the US Copyright Office last month claiming that jailbreaking is illegal. They're not going to take firing a direct salvo at the App Store itself lightly. There is competition for the iTunes Music Store, but Apple could argue that the homegrown app stores infringe on its copyright by using modified versions of its software.

It's not a huge shock that App Store competition is popping up; the only surprise is that it took this long to happen. After all, developers are frustrated that excellent programs such as Podcaster are passed up in favor of the latest, greatest novelty app -- then to make matters worse, those same features turned up in an official iPhone update.

While there are a lot of really terrible apps out there that have no place on the App Store -- I won't even begin to tell you about one adult app pitched to TUAW, we do want to remain a mostly family-friendly site -- there are a lot of good software that get turned down because of Apple's stringent developer's agreement. These developers want an avenue to distribute their programs, and homegrown app stores are one answer.

Cydia's Jay Freeman told the WSJ that he has lined up a lawyer in case Apple comes knocking at the door. He may also want to get in touch with the team that represents Psystar ... just in case.

[via Engadget]

Occipital's ClearCam is another in a long line of photo enhancing apps for the iPhone. ClearCam is going live today on Cydia, so at this point it is only available for jailbroken iPhones. The developer says he hopes a version for all iPhones will make it to the App Store soon.

ClearCam has a couple of interesting modes. Enhanced mode will give you a 4MP image rather than the standard 2 MP image you get now on the iPhone. The magic is done by having the camera take 6 pictures in rapid succession. The software then aligns and enhances the photo and saves it to your camera roll. When you compare the image to a normal one, they look the same, but you can enlarge the image more than a 2MP image, and the noise is noticeably lower. You should be able to see the difference in the gallery image below. That function may not be to Apple's liking, because it breaks the SDK rules of how software can interact with the camera.

In ClearCam's other mode, called QuickShot, it fires off 4 images, figures out which image is best, and throws the bad ones away. I tried using this mode, and it worked as advertised. The results weren't dramatic, but were easy to see. You can contrast this approach with Sudobility's Night Camera app, which uses the accelerometer to determine when your hands have stopped shaking so it can snap a stable longer exposure.

If ClearCam is going to be released through the App Store, it will likely shed the Enhanced mode unless they can get Apple to allow the variance with SDK rules. Occipital is not yet sure about pricing. They say if they have to throw away features, the price will be nominal or free. The feature complete version released through Cydia is free for 15 days, then it's US $9.99.

Click through the gallery below for a look at how ClearCam works.

Those with jailbroken iPhones who use the Cydia package manager discovered a new add-on in the past day or so -- Clippy, from iSpazio, which introduces a method for copy and paste to the iPhone.

According to users, the add-on inserts two buttons into the system keyboard -- one for copying and another for pasting. Those who have tried it out say that it only accepts user-entered text and copies over one line at a time, which can get cumbersome.

Sebastien over at the iPhone Download Blog gives a detailed overview of how the application works. "After installing the application, type any text you want and simply hit the "123″ button on your keyboard to show the copy/paste buttons. Tap "copy" and start selecting the text you want to copy. Tap "copy" again to end the selection. Then tap "paste" to paste this text where you want it to be." This implementation isn't up to Apple's standards for grace and ease, but it seems workable.

My iPhone isn't jailbroken, so I haven't had the chance to try out Clippy. If you've downloaded and had a chance to try out the app, please let us know your impression in the comments.

Thanks to all who submitted this!

We recently got a tip over to this It's Just Poison post about Veency for jailbroken iPhones from Jay "Saurik" Freeman, the author and maintainer of Cydia. Veency provides a VNC remote desktop server for your iPhone, allowing you to connect to the shared screen of your handheld from any VNC client (Apple Remote Desktop, Chicken of the VNC, and more).

I downloaded a copy to my iPhone, rebooted and gave it a whirl to see how well it worked using Chicken of the VNC on my Mac.

From first go, it did what it promised: offering tap-interpretation of my Mac-based mouse clicks as iPhone-sourced finger taps. The current mouse position on the Mac was echoed as a small "x" on the iPhone, so I could always see where the virtual finger was.

After typing his fingers to the bone, overworked iPhone developer Jay "Saurik" Freeman has finally finished his long-awaited Cydia release. As Freeman puts it, the iPhone is a 667MHz computer with 128MB RAM and at least 4GB of flash. So why not use it as a Unix workstation?

Motivated by the relative limitations of the existing BSD subsystem, Freeman decided to port Debian's APT to the iPhone -- tweaking items to work better with the iPhone's relatively messed-up network settings. A UIKit front end, Cydia, provides a GUI for users to select and install programs -- basically Installer.app for fully leaded geeks. Cydia isn't limited to command-line software. It should allow installation of any and all software package types.