The App Store provides some very useful and polished applications for iPods and iPhones. But there are also others, rather unofficial tools out there, which are not really approved by Apple, but which should be taken into consideration by iUsers.
 
This more or less clandestine procedure by the means of which one rigs one's iPhone or iPod to run this kind of third-party applications is called jailbreaking. And, even if the App Store has quite a nice collection, there are still a lot of people who are still interested in what's available outside it.

According to Macworld.com, one of the most basic and necessary jailbreaking applications goes by the name of Cydia; it's an installer that lets you download other third-party tools. It was created by Jay Freeman and if you use Pwnage Tool or QuickPwn to bust open your iPhone / iPod, you get it with the package.

If you want your iPhone camera to shoot videos at 6 to 15 frame rates per second, than Cycorder might be of interest to you. It's a free tool, also bearing Freeman's signature, and the movies you make with it are MJPEGs which you can play on your Mac.

Snapture is another camera-tweaking application, and it actually turns it into a mini-digital camera with some cool features like digital zoom, black-and-white filter, burst mode and all sorts of timer functions.

Podcaster is something you can use to directly transfer podcasts on your iPod touch or iPhone, by stream or download, without having to use iTunes. So you can well see why Apple wouldn't accept such a tool on the App Store; Podcaster's creator, Alex Sokirynsky, charges $5 for one copy of it, which you can of course get via Cydia.