Mmm, look purdy!

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.

The technical issues surrounding the launch are well-known by now. However, the flagship store didn’t seem to be able to sort out what they could do to alleviate this. Maybe because they were such an important store, with lots of press stood outside, they didn’t do anything until they got an explicit go-ahead from Corporate. For, those who turned up at Sherway Gardens at 9:30am were given numbered tickets referring to their place in line for the 50-odd 8GB and 12-odd 16GB they had in stock. All before the store opened. It was gone 2pm at Dundas & Yonge before the same thing was done there, at which point most people had simply given up or had to leave for work. To my knowledge, only one person was able to reserve a phone before that point, a 16GB white model. As far as I could tell, he had begun queueing the previous evening, and had quite possibly got into the store & sat there waiting for his order to process & activate before having to leave for work.

So, at about 7:30am the queue began to move forward somewhat. It moved in a few spurts of about 10-20 people it seemed. Presumably the first few were being moved around a bit for the benefit of the press. The photograph on Q ratings

iPhone: 9 out of ten (”pretty darned good”)
Customer Service: 7 out of ten (”friendly and reasonably capable”)
Rogers Network: 2 out of ten (”the IT folks said all systems should be rebooted at once? How will that help bandwidth? Won’t it kill the network all over again?”)

The complete (2560×1600) screenshot

The source code is, needless to say, Leopard-only, and the Time Machine helper class uses ObjC 2.0 features such as properties and @optional protocol specifications.

The archive above contains the project, based upon

For now, enjoy, and ping me via the comments for more information.

Click each thumbnail for a full-size picture.

Today has been a long day, so I’ll break off here, but expect some more news soon.