It is way early days yet, but the SDMMobileDevice project is now available publicly on github. Meant to provide an open-source, public alternative to Apple's private MobileDevice framework, this OS X project enables you to detect attached iOS devices and communicate with them.
With it, you can query connected devices for their software and hardware configurations, communicate with services, access sandboxed applications, and perform file transfers and application installations.
Developer Sam Marshall is hard at work at toughening up the codebase (it's still early alpha) and providing a more intuitive, delegate-based Objective-C approach to using it.
