Two people -- and a police car -- wait outside the Apple Store at 8 a.m. on Saturday, July 31, the day after its official opening and two hours before its second day opening.

Now we can finally drop the Apple Store watch. As reported and expected, the Apple Store at 1607 Walnut Street near Rittenhouse Square opened Friday late afternoon and did so with much fanfare. Rather than recreate the coverage, we figured we’d offer you a spin through the best.

• Apple Store development timeline — Brownstoner
• Inside the Apple Store photos — Brownstoner
• The Apple of many an eye opening — Inquirer (Good perspective on retail effect)
• The Line for the New Apple Store — Daring Fireball
• That New Store Smell — John Gruber’s Flickr
• Philadelphia finally gets an Apple Store — Fortune (complete with a Philly dig or two)

Below, check out some videos of the opening. The rush into the opening, from someone who claims to have gone to 22 Apple Store openings. The Line for a New Apple Store from John Gruber And now let’s return to reality.

At 9:30 this morning windows were being washed at the new Walnut Street Apple Store. Apple’s flagship Philadelphia store will open this evening at 5:00 p.m., according to reports.

Finishing touches continued to be added to the Walnut Street Apple Store Wednesday morning, set to open Friday at 5:00 p.m. We’ll keep these coming each morning through the opening.

The first 1,000 vistors will receive a free t-shirt so keep a look out for news reports of John Street waiting in line.

As we’ve been reporting, 1607 Walnut got a storefront on July 14th and has been hiring since December.

DEFINITE READS

• The New York Times reports that two University of Pennsylvania professors are challenging Alzheimer’s disease with a new drug-discovery program and a $1.5 million robot.
• Inc. magazine lists Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail of mobile payment service Venmo on their 30 under 30.

MIGHT BE OF INTEREST

• Geekadelphia reports on PHILO, a Philadelphia based startup connecting social media and TV watching.
• The Flightster blog shares something of an essay on Philadelphia still being a city of revolution, focusing on Indy Hall, Nat Mechanics and Old City.

GIVE A GLANCE

• Peter Key at the Philadelphia Business Journal reports that “RoseAnn Rosenthal, the president and CEO of Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, has been selected by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to be a member of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.”
• On his personal blog, Duck Duck Go founder Gabe Weinberg announces the launching of his duck.co community forum.
• Geekadelphia also gives us the latest on the Walnut Street Apple Store — a sign.

Every Friday morning, we make sure you didn t miss anything with Friday Tech Links.

The Apple Store front. Photo by Brownstoner.

Our good friends over at Brownstoner have provided an update on the status of Philadelphia’s Apple Store. Pictures on the real estate blog show the glass storefront being assembled at 1607 Walnut Street. Philly Chit Chat even has a video of the new storefront being lifted into place.

To refresh your memory, rumor of the Apple Store had been swirling for years until in November when the Metro reported that the store was finally coming to Rittenhouse Square. In December, the company officially put out the call for employees and the building has been under construction ever since, though it was picketed by union protestors.

No word yet on when the store will open.

Disclosure: Apple retailer Springboard Media is a longtime sponsor of Technically Philly.

Experian Simmons Mosaic profile of users of iPod, iPhone or Mac computers (including home and work)

Updated, Apr. 20, 1:33 p.m.: Due to rounding error that affected the language of the title and lede of the post, we’ve corrected the story to indicate that only one-fourth of Philadelphia’s population owns or uses Apple products, instead of one-third.

Count the computers you see at the coffeehouse to see if it jives, but Philadelphia is one-fourth Apple.

According to research firm Experion Simmons, 27 percent of the Philadelphia market, or 1.6 million people, use Apple products. The figure might seem incredulous if it wasn’t for the large number of white earbuds one can easily spot on the subway.

The firm says that the Philadelphia market is ranked 17th in nation for the number of its Apple users, after analyzing the propensity for a consumer to own an iPod, iPhone or a Mac computer.

In the top market, San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, Experion says that 32 percent of adults own or use at least one Apple product.

Where it gets interesting is in comparing the report’s top markets with locations of Apple Retail Stores, leaving out Apple Certified stores, or any retailers carrying Apple products.

More than 11 Apple Retail Stores service the San Francisco market, the largest number of Apple users based by percentage. Elsewhere in California, though 30 percent of San Diegans use Apple products, there’s only two Apple stores to serve 682,000 customers.

In Boston, six Apple stores serve its 1.5 million customers and in New York, there’s 13 stores for 4.9 million Apple users—surprise—the largest population of Apple users in the country. And talk about excess: sixteen stores serve Los Angeles and its 3.6 million Apple users.

It’s not hard to find an Apple store in Philadelphia, as is likely well-known, with four stores in the region serving our customer base and a fifth store on the way, as we’ve reported.

Perhaps its Santa Maria, California that has it worst; its 140,00 Apple users would have to travel 116 miles—more than two hours—to reach the nearest Apple store in Thousand Oaks.

[h/t PhillyTechNews]

The Walnut Street location today and its proposed look upon opening.

Updated 4/8/10 @ 2:14 p.m.: Brownstoner has an interior shot of the current location.

The “computer illiterate” architect based outside of Scranton that helped envision the Apple retail store aesthetic and who is leading plans for the company’s much-heralded first Center City location was profiled by the Inquirer’s Inga Saffron recently.

While Saffron’s profile focuses much on Peter Bohlin’s noted Fifth Avenue “cube” location in Manhattan, the piece did touch on the 1607-1609 location that she reports is scheduled to open in July:

The Philadelphia store won’t be a signature design like the Cube, but it will incorporate key elements of the BCJ prototype, from the minimal scrim of the glass facade to the strict linear arrangement of the tables and products. A second-floor seminar room should help make it a gathering place.

We reported the store was hiring as far back as December.

Picketers outside 1607 Walnut Street. Photo taken by Hughe Dillon.

Laborers’ union members are picketing tweeted:

“[The picketers are] against owners of [those] prepping the [building] for the Apple lease,” tweeted:

In December we reported that this, the first official Apple store to be located in the city, was hiring.

No one is suggesting that iPhone applications are going to save legacy media. But the conversation so often turns to profitability on mobile platforms, that it may be a surprise there are so  few truly local products from Philadelphia media.

NBC10 and 6ABC have free apps developed with the help of their national parents. Shopiks offers Philly coupons, and there’s the popular Philadelphia Concert Hub.

A screenshot of the app's interface. Click to enlarge.

“The rest are tour guides, canned content, RSS readers of Philly feeds or some sort of national content that is supposed to relate to our area,” says Keith McGinnis, who recently left a role heading up IT for Review Publishing, whose flagship brand is Philadelphia Weekly.

In December, PW likely made the region’s strongest big media play into mobile by launching a McGinnis-led Philly Happy Hour Guide application for the iPhone and iPod touch. The application offers users the chance to search and find the best happy hour deals at specific locations, specific bars, specific neighborhoods or wherever is nearest. There are options for calling a cab, getting directions and tracking just what’s your favorite.

Last month, the app became free to use, after a paid trial version, and so now, McGinnis says, PW has an excellent opportunity to test the waters of localized mobile profitability, ahead of anyone else in Philadelphia (No particular provision is being made for the few hundred who paid $1 for the app, McGinnis says, “I figure you saved $1 on your first drink special.”)

McGinnis is now joining the staff of Northern Liberties Web development firm o3world, but the Happy Hour Guide is still close enough to his heart that he took the time to chat with Technically Philly about how the app plans on making money, how it got made and what it means for PW’s always active competition with crosstown rival CityPaper.

[Full Disclosure: This author has written for both Philadelphia Weekly and CityPaper.]

You dropped the 99 cent price tag. How is this thing going to make money?

The two revenue streams are, one, featured placement, offering sponsors branding as the highlighted bar in our listing. As a featured listing, you also rise to the top position for any iPhone that is closest to your establishment. So users look for what has the best drink specials around, and they see the featured listing first. Two, sponsorship, like co-branding on the app and sponsorship tied to the Web site. We have some future plans around Apple push notification for the next version. I’d like to stay away from ads in the app, mostly because they aren’t very good creatives. Mobile ads kinda suck, like banner ads on websites

From idea to implementation, what was the time line like for the project?

That’s everyone’s big question: how long did it take? Take as a given that you have a CMS for the data that can organize and spit out some form of XML. Then, from commitment with a developer to first prototype was about four weeks. About another four to five in refinement, finishing and testing. So nine weeks from the start until our first submission to Apple. Add about one week’s worth of time of forty hours or so in front of that to RFP and find developers, etc. Now, once at Apple, like everyone says, it was a painful wait.

It took a full eight weeks to get approved. We submitted in late September and finally went live Nov. 3 in the store. We were rejected twice for bugs.

What were the bugs?

The first rejection was for user experience. If the lookup [for a bar] failed, the user didn’t get a warning — easy fix. The second one was a bug that did not exist under OS 3.01 when we submitted, but two weeks later when Apple actually tested, OS 3.1 was out and we had a bug. No way to avoid that one. It was another simple fix, and we were approved in a few days after that.

I’m happy to say we did this very cost effectively. The project start to finish, including the developer, CMS tweaking and gateway server cost under $10,000. Data entry and maintenance are another story. It’s not a lot, I’m just not sure [as it fits under other tasks of the organization]. The way I designed the app’s function, the content is independent of the application on the phone, so it’s always pulling the latest data. Rachel Piot [Advertising Sales Coordinator for PW] is handling the data, and she has been wonderful.

Diversions from existing print business always seem to be points of contention, even in progressive alt-weekly newsrooms. Was this Happy Hour Guide any exception?

As with any product, it gets more attention and respect once it’s generating good money. We’re well on our way to doing just that. At that point, I think we’ll have everyone’s attention.

An interesting point for concepts like News Inkubator is that this is a sales driven effort. Our sales team is fully integrated with helping design functionality that will deliver value for their advertiser.

Screenshot of map in app interface. Click to enlarge.

They also help keep this data to ensure it’s correct for their clients. I’ve been working on Web projects for a long time, so I can say that this is rarely the case.

Many times the tech side shows what it can do, rather than build to suit the revenue streams needs. I think we did a good job of balancing what was possible and ad product opportunities with Phillyweekly.com and our sister sites. This is just the beginning of maximizing what’s possible when you have truly unified multimedia publishing.

This mobile app is another step in a long  building process at Review of which you’ve been a part, yes?

More than two years of planning and building the redesign and this app has finally come to actuality… That feels good.

Speaking of which, perhaps the largest step of that process was last spring’s redesign of PW’s site. Has that proved fruitful?

Yes. But, mind you, we just launched our third site on Clickability [in December], so to us, the project is just completing. It went Phillyweekly.com in March, ACWeekly.com in September, and [third sister paper] SouthPhillyReview.com in December.

As for PhillyWeekly.com, which has been running longest, yes. We saw time on site go from under one minute to over 2.5 minutes. We saw bounce rate drop on the home page by over 35 percent.

So, what’s your take on the sizable traffic difference between PW and competitor CityPaper?

My take is that it sucks. I really can’t comment on that though.

…Thankfully, many [problems] are being corrected  in 2010. I truly feel PW’s product — its content –  is constantly growing and improving. We plan to do much, much better. The most exciting things coming in 2010, I can’t talk about. That’s kind of cool.

What I have done, through things like the CMS project and iPhone platform is work hard to prove to our internal partners and clients and audience… that we can make much better marketing and advertising tools, ones that people like using. Ones that really engage and that are just plain more fun and cooler

Do you guys see something like an iPhone app as a direct move to take an upperhand on CP in an alt-weekly mainstay like listings?

You know what. CP isn’t my worry. It’s CP and the 20 or so other sources of legit A&E and nightlife content that are everywhere in Philly. I think that products like Food Guide or Happy Hour Guide, do create a good listings product that people can use. Extending that onto mobile makes a ton of sense.

Why did you leave Review?

To build more digital solutions for more brands and businesses. And for my career, I worked very hard to get to director of tech. To do it for an advertising and marketing firm that gets digital and [does so] via 100 percent web and mobile technology,I jumped at the chance.

What can we expect in the future from the Review and mobile?

There are plans to update [PW's Happy Hour Guide] project in the spring, in addition to rolling out a similar product for bars down the shore from [PW sister publication the Atlantic City Weekly]. There will be plenty more. Keep posted.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings you an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.