I got an iPhone 3G on Friday, and I’m really quite happy with it now. It wasn’t an easy process, however; the closest store to my house claimed to have 10 units in total, and so, reasoning that there weren’t any bigger stores closer by, and that there were people waiting overnight at the main Toronto store, I decided to head for the main store. They should have plenty on hand, I thought, or at least if they don’t have enough I’ll know at 8am-ish, so I’ll have plenty of time to find a smaller store with no lineup by 10am when the other stores opened.

So, I queued up with a bunch of other folks on Friday outside the Rogers store at Yonge & Dundas, with all the press & suchlike. I arrived at 6:15am, and left — with an 8GB iPhone 3G, thankfully — at about 4:45pm. For most of the afternoon, I was less than 20 yards from the door of the Rogers store, watching one person go in about every 30-45 minutes or so.

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So, I’m currently sat outside the Apple Store at Sherway Gardens, holding my MacBook Air, working on a couple of projects, and waiting for the keynote to start up. If anyone wants to join me (especially anyone with a portable battery pack, since Sherway appears to have closed off all its power points) I’ll be here until the end of the keynote. Either that or Twitter me, assuming Twitter doesn’t die horribly under the WWDC onslaught — I’m alanQuatermain.

Good luck to all who’re waiting for specific news, and let’s hope I can change the title to ‘Happy iPhone Day’ later.

Update: Okay, now I’m actually in the Apple store, borrowing their power supply. Apple customer service = EPIC WIN.

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So, the iPod touch was announced yesterday, and made available to order. I’ve placed an order for the 8GB model (having bought a 30GB iPod classic not long ago, which is plenty big enough to contain everything I have), pretty much purely so I can do some iPhone programming.

According to MacRumors, the iPod touch and the iPhone both run the same operating system, on the same hardware, to the degree where the apps on the iPod touch are “the same damn binaries” as on the iPhone. This means that I’ll be able to do some work with ‘Touch OS X’, be it the UIKit or more esoteric items such as CoreSurface (low-level graphics), GMM (Google Maps), DeviceLink, ITSync (iTunes sync, which probably uses DeviceLink internally), MultitouchSupport, MusicLibrary (in Obj-C, no less), and the iPhone Preferences.

My order is due to ship by September 28th, and due to arrive by October 5th. Hopefully it’ll ship ahead of schedule, but once it arrives, we’ll see whether there’s a disk mode I can enable, and whether that gives us the ability to see the OS drive. Personally, I have my fingers crossed for a Journaled HFS+ partition with a custom UUID, like the Apple TV’s software restore partition. That’s at least mountable on the desktop.

I can hardly wait !

PS: I’m now following John Gruber’s example and making all my posts using MarsEdit by Daniel Jalkut. It seems to work really quite nicely, so go & buy it now. Yes now. No, you can’t wait until later. Oh, okay, if you’re actually in the middle of something then you can wait until you’re done. But as soon as you’re done you’re going to buy it. Bokay?

MacRumors has a story up indicating that the iPhone might be opened up to third-party developers after all. At the moment it seems that Apple is considering it, although of course the official word hasn’t changed.

My money is on the API remaining officially closed for a while yet, although I think they are likely cleaning it up for outside consumption. Probably we’ll see some specific developers getting access to a set of tools under NDA, to get some feedback, with something going public later on. Possibly with Leopard, more likely later, unless they’ve had a great change of heart.