Steve Jobs, in 2007, stood on stage and announced the iPhone. Developers everywhere drooled. We all wanted to write apps for this thing. After all it was the smartphone we had all dreamed of. But there was no discussion at all of a developer toolkit. Afterward someone must have asked. I remember the shockwaves reverberating through the developer community when it was announced there wouldn’t be one.

Well, less than a year later, we had a developer toolkit and the race to develop native apps was on. Even I recognized, someone who had done very little web development, that in some ways that was a huge step backward. Of course few of us discussed it at the time. We were too busy rushing to get our apps in the App Store.

As I now dig into HTML5 — and am loving every second of it — I can’t help but wonder what would have been different if Apple had stuck to their guns. What if Apple had stuck with that initial proclamation? What if the only tools we had, as developers, was web apps? What would be different today?

I started a list.

• Access to a wider array of sensors via JS
• Other devices would be more standards compliant to keep up with Apple
• Extra JS libraries to bridge to Apple’s graphics packages
• No App Store, possibly better ways to market our apps?
• More websites that have pretty icons when you save them to your home screen
• Monetization provided by Apple like Stripe or Braintree, leaving us to have an actual customer relationship
• Universal logins
• More developers doing web (meaning open) development, able to develop both local and server solutions
• Native code (C/C++) in more browsers
• Much of the same code (responsive) would run on Mac, Windows and mobile
• Better usage analytics
• Much better JS animations

Have any to add?

In late 2007, we started working on a web based version of powerOne. We started learning Rails on the back end and HTML and CSS on the front. Soon we would have dug into Javascript.

Then Apple announced its SDK and all web-based work, except marketing and a small amount of back end work stuff, like the library, went out the window. We shifted all of our focus to learning native iOS (at that time called iPhone). We got pretty good at it, too, especially for productivity style apps. And of course the work we did on powerOne was popular. We’ve had over 1.5 million downloads, not bad for a productivity tool.

But here I am six years later learning JS, HTML and CSS. The technology is amazing. I’ve never developed with anything so immediate in my life. It is magical to run a command in the console and see it immediately react in the browser window. No compilation time, no waiting on the simulator and debugger. And the basics, especially when using something like jQuery, is actually pretty easy.

Maybe it wasn’t the same back then. After all, Internet Explorer was still way behind on compatibility, there was no jQuery Mobile, HTML5 was really just rolling out. I can’t complain about my timing. But the frustration over not being better versed at such an amazing technology is palpable for me. I wish I would have done more of this earlier.

Matt Miller wrote a great post on Congress’ absurd hearings on Apple’s tax status:

Why are we publicly browbeating an iconic U.S. firm in an era in which we should be encouraging every innovative company to locate and expand high-value work in America? What kind of message do hearings like this send to firms overseas (or U.S.-based multinationals weighing their capital plans) about America being open for business and hungry for job-creating investment?

Once upon a time, Democratic senators like Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts wisely quipped that “you cannot love employment and hate employers.”

But common sense has given way to easy grandstanding.

Congress is always quick to point out it is someone else’s fault. Don’t like the way US companies avoid US taxes? Fix the damned tax code.

Or better yet, let’s combine the IRS “scandal” [1] with the Apple tax “scandal” and have the IRS audit all Congressional member tax records. Then we can really see who is skimming.

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[1] Why is no one asking why these organizations are even being granted tax exempt status? We have a situation arise that would be the perfect opportunity to have a national debate but our President and Congressional members are busy hiding from partisan firebombs. Well, most of them anyway.