Jailbroken iPhone file system access from Mac OS X

[PowerGoofy]

I'm planning on developing some programs that need to access the file system of my jailbroken iPhone from Mac OS X. I would like to do this over a USB connection, mainly because it's faster and more reliable than doing it via SSH.
I've looked all over the Internet to find how to do this, but I couldn't find anything relevant.
So can anyone of you give me a starting point? Is using I/O Kit the right approach? I don't have too much experience with the I/O Kit framework, so if anyone could provide me with some code to do this, that would be highly appreciated!
I have played around with I/O Kit a little bit though. Code that uses it typically starts like this:

CFMutableDictionaryRef matchingDict = IOServiceMatching(someServiceName);
io_service_t service = IOServiceGetMatchingService(kIOMasterPortDefault, matchingDict);

But what would I use as the service name for the IOServiceMatching function?
Also, it would be nice if you could use I/O Kit to find the iPhone and obtain a path to its device file (in the /dev directory) and then use POSIX I/O functions (that I am familiar with) to actually access the file.
But maybe I/O Kit is just the wrong way to do it and I'm totally missing the point here.

So I would very much appreciate it if anyone could give me some help on how to solve this problem. It would open up a whole new lot of possiblities.
Thank you in advance!