MDM-ADPH

Java JSONWriter Domino Agent Class

2011-09-27T09:40:00.001-05:00

If you're like me, in the coarse of your web development years with Domino you've had to create plenty of agents that need to output little bits of JSON as output to the browser for some reason or another. Since these were just bits of JSON here and there, I created the code to do this from scratch every time I made a new agent -- not the best way to do things, but it worked. I eventually got tired of that and created a small helper class for Java that simplified this process.

Simply add it to your Java agent, and then initialize it with a "JSONWriter.start()", passing "getAgentOutput()" as the sole parameter. This can be done from anywhere in your code, as long as it's before whenever you try to start printing JSON output. Just pass the string name of your JSON parameter, followed by either a string, variable, or boolean value. Close up the stream with "JSONWriter.end()" whenever you're finished.

(I have a git repo of this code at https://github.com/mdmadph/mdmjava.)

package util;

import java.io.PrintWriter;
import lotus.domino.NotesException;

/**
 * @author mdm-adph
 *
 */
public class JSONWriter {

	/**
	 * 
	 */
	private static PrintWriter printOutput = null;
	
	/**
	 * 
	 */
	private static boolean firstParam = true;
	
	/**
	 * Default constrctor.
	 * @constructor
	 */
	private JSONWriter() throws NotesException {
	}
	
	/**
	 * Initializes the JSONWriter singleton with the desired PrintWriter
	 * @param pOutput {PrintWriter}
	 * The PrintWriter object to associate with JSONWriter,
	 * usually the result of getAgentOutput()
	 */
	public static synchronized void start(PrintWriter pOutput) {
		if (printOutput == null) {
			printOutput = pOutput;
			
			printOutput.println("Content-type: application/json");
			printOutput.println("{");
		}
	}
	
	/**
	 * Internal function that prints the actual JSON information
	 * @param param {String}
	 * The string value of the JSON parameter name.
	 * @param value {String}
	 * The value of the JSON parameter.
	 */
	private static synchronized void printLine(String param, String value) {
		if (firstParam) {
			firstParam = false;
		}
		else {
			printOutput.println(",");
		}
		
		printOutput.println("\"" + param + "\":" + value);
	}
	
	/**
	 * Public interface for printLine() for string params
	 * @param param {String}
	 * The string value of the JSON parameter name.
	 * @param value {String}
	 * The value of the JSON parameter.
	 */
	public static void print(String param, String value) {
		printLine(param, "\"" + value + "\"");
	}
	
	/**
	 * Public interface for printLine for integer params
	 * @param param {String}
	 * The string value of the JSON parameter name.
	 * @param value {int}
	 * The value of the JSON parameter.
	 */
	public static void print(String param, int value) {
		printLine(param, Integer.toString(value));
	}
	
	/**
	 * Public interface for printLine for Boolean params
	 * @param param {String}
	 * The string value of the JSON parameter name.
	 * @param value {Boolean}
	 * The value of the JSON parameter.
	 */
	public static void print(String param, Boolean value) {
		printLine(param, Boolean.toString(value));
	}
	
	/**
	 * Closes the JSON stream
	 */
	public static synchronized void end() {
		printOutput.println("}");
	}
	
	@Override
	public Object clone() throws CloneNotSupportedException { 
		throw new CloneNotSupportedException(); // that'll teach 'em 
	}
}

JS/ExtJS Code to Determine Age

2011-07-20T08:41:00.001-05:00

Just something I came up with for a form I'm building -- is there a quicker way to do this?

(_now.format('Y') - birthdate.format('Y')) 
     - (_now.format('z') < birthdate.format('z') ? 1 : 0)

LDDMonkey -- Greasemonkey Script for the IBM LDD Forums

2011-07-13T13:58:00.001-05:00

http://www.openntf.org/projects/pmt.nsf/ProjectLookup/LDDMonkey

Here's a little Greasemonkey script I've been using for the past few years to make browsing the LDD forums at ibm.com tolerable -- I'm amazed constantly that this script still works!

It Always Felt Like Addon Support in IE was an Afterthought...

2011-06-21T13:11:00.001-05:00

For some reason, I took a look at the "addons" my copy of IE8 had installed -- I wanted to sort them by date (to see which was oldest), but no matter how many times I clicked on the column header, they wouldn't seem to sort. Just then, I realized they were sorting, just not the way you would think.

We always knew addon support in IE was an afterthought, didn't we? Please tell me it's not supposed to be like that. (I used to have this problem as a budding Notes developer a LONG time ago, until I learned the difference between text and datetime formats.)

Configuring the IBM Domino Server to Show the Mobile Login Form to Android Users

2011-04-20T14:46:00.018-05:00

Just like many programmers have today, I've been starting to do a little bit of mobile development on the side with the Domino server, and I've been discovering the little tweaks IBM has been doing here and there to make Domino more mobile-friendly. For instance, upon navigating your web browser to a Domino app with your iPhone or iPad, you're greeted with a touch-friend version of the standard login screen:

Unfortunately, this special login view was apparently not extended to users of Android devices, as I found when I tried to login with my phone. I was provided with the standard login screen, which is not very mobile-friendly at all.

Now, when you do finally login with your non-iOS mobile device, the actual database, such as your mailfile, will detect your non-iOS mobile device, and load an appropriate mobile interface. Interesting.

So, I figured that a lot of the default Domino coding could detect non-iOS devices, but for some reason the login window portal (a database named DominoWebAccessRedirect.nsf) doesn't. I delved into the code for a bit, finding some interesting bits of code, and a reference to @GetProfileField that apparently grabbed a list of user-agent data (from a profile document) that was checked against the user trying to login.

Figuring that there must be some way to edit that document, I did a little bit of Google searching, and found that it's actually rather easy:

First, open up DominoWebAccessRedirect.nsf in your Notes Client:

Click on "Setup", and then click on "Ultra-lite/Mobile Settings":

Then, under "Mobile Device User Agent Keywords", enter whatever you like. Something tells me that "android" will probably be entered here already for you by default on the next release.

[ Resources: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/inotes-ultra ]

Amazon Cloud Storage

2011-03-29T15:48:00.001-05:00

I've been looking at the Storage ecosystem that Amazon released today as part of it's "Cloud Drive" system, and I'll admit I'm impressed with what I see. I'm thinking from the view of a "regular" user:

The system is available to any Amazon.com customer (at least in the US and UK right now). You get 5GB of storage by default. If you buy an album from them this year, you're automatically given a free subscription to their 20GB service for one year.

You can easily upload your existing music using the Amazon MP3 Uploader, an Adobe AIR-made program, which I assume works on Windows, Mac~~, and even Linux~~. It can easily find music automatically, or you can specify where to look.

This music that's uploaded can be listened to from a web browser from anywhere.

The corresponding Android app (that was typically used only to purchase MP3's) now also works as a streaming music player -- additionally, MP3's you upload to the Cloud Drive service can also be downloaded to your phone's storage for local playing. This can be setup to happen automatically whenever something is uploaded to your Cloud Drive.

MP3's you purchase on Amazon can now be automatically added to your Cloud Drive. You can choose to download these whenever you want -- MP3's added in this automatic way upon purchase do NOT count towards your 5GB limit.

Honestly, I'm incredibly surprised. They beat both Apple and Google to the punch with a cloud music service -- Google, especially, who promised it at last years Google IO conference.

Now, nobody knows what kinds of deals they had to make the various record companies in order to get their "compliance" (even if you argue that it isn't needed), and they could get sued to the moon and back tomorrow, but for now, I'm applauding Android.

Automatic Blogger Mobile Web Templates

2010-12-20T11:04:00.000-06:00

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, Blogger.

The Future is Now

2010-12-17T13:16:00.000-06:00

I'm imagining a future in which I'm walking around in a foreign country, looking through augmented reality glasses and having my colorblindness corrected on the fly, all while having signs in different languages being translated for me in real time.

Kinect Hand Detection

2010-12-09T15:09:00.002-06:00

I remember when Minority Report came out eight years ago, the talk was that we wouldn't see this type of tech in our lifetime.

Now we do, only you don't have to wear the silly fingertip thingies, and it's made with a hacked-up video game peripheral.

Installing Notes 8.5.1 on Ubuntu 10.04

2010-10-27T11:33:00.003-05:00

In short: it works, after a tiny bit of extra configuration (of course!). It took me a while to find out the answers about how to get this to work, but here you go, paraphrased from the LDD:

1) First of all, get your Notes .DEB file and install it. If you get a message about a dependency that can't be fulfilled, just search for the name of the library on google -- you'll find a link to it right away (usually on Ubuntu's servers, directly). Download it and install it, and then restart the Notes .DEB. (In my case it was libgnome-desktop-2 -- perhaps Notes 8.5.1 is looking for a few Ubuntu 8.04 libs?)

2) When it's done installing, download the file from this location, and unpack it:

http://linux-aha.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/notes_libs_karmic.tgz

3) There are four files contained therein.

libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0
libgdk_pixbuf_xlib-2.0.so.0
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0

Give them root ownership and 755 permissions, and place them in "/opt/ibm/lotus/notes". Just a few commands like:

sudo chmod 755 *.so.0
sudo chown root:root *.so.0
sudo mv *.so.0 /opt/ibm/lotus/notes

from inside the folder you unpacked should do the trick.

4) Start Lotus Notes. No, that's it -- no more steps.

Steps 2 and 3 are necessary because, for some reason, these files aren't included with the Notes installation, and if you start Notes without having copied those four files over, nothing will display. Not documents, not applications, not your mail file -- nothing. It's like nothing is being rendered.

At first I thought it may have been a problem with some sort of renderer that Notes is expecting to work a certain way, and since my Ubuntu install was heavily modified and hacked, I figured it was my fault. So, I started up a virtual machine with a fresh install of 10.04, but no -- same problem.

[Related links:]

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/5f27803bba85d8e285256bf10054620d/86db5333ddbe99e985257666003081ba?OpenDocument

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/DateAllFlatWeb/69b50f2db7bb7b0b85257659005ab79e?OpenDocument

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/5f27803bba85d8e285256bf10054620d/303b25b9cfc35789852576620030ae13?OpenDocument

Notes 8 HTML Email Image Loading

2010-09-27T15:35:00.001-05:00

Well, my dev team has finally been instructed that we're moving to Notes 8, and not a moment too soon!

I know Notes 8 has been out for several years now, but when you're maintaining the sheer amount of installations that my team deals with, I have a feeling it isn't too out of the ordinary to wait a year or so before moving to a new version of a major environment.

I've been doing a little bit of dev here and there, and I reached my first roadblock today -- HTML emails with images just won't load up in Notes 8 or 8.5. (They load up normally in Notes 7.) Either the user has to right-click on the email and select "Load Images," or the individual user has to set an option in his/her preference.

It looks a little different in Notes 8.5.

Now, of course, you can set this preference amongst many computers by using a Windows Policy, but the setting is disabled by default (viruses, spam, saving bandwidth -- take your pick). So, that idea was shot down, and I didn't really argue that much -- I've dealt with these kinds of problems in Notes before, and I had the nagging suspicion that there's a hidden field or two you can set on a new email that will enable those images to load when the user opens the email.

And what do you know, there is:

Looking through the design of the new mail template, I found that the "Show Images" link is on the (FollowUpMemoSubform) subform. The code indicates that a field named $DelayedImagesOK set to the value "ok" would display the inline images. In the mail template, this field is set using the ShowDelayedImages sub, in the DelayedImages script library. What the code does is to create the field $DelayedImagesOK, setting the value to "ok" and saving the document. The client then reloads the document, which displays the images. [Source]

I actually found this through a post at the Lotus Developer Forums -- the dev wasn't having very good luck with it (he seemed to be concerned with what type of field the "$DelayedImagesOK" field needed to be). However, from what I've found, it doesn't matter -- or at least it doesn't in the way that I'm creating these emails.

I create them in LS and Java agents, and it seems like just using

Call doc.ReplaceItemValue("$DelayedImagesOK", "ok")

in LotusScript or

memo.appendItemValue("$DelayedImagesOK","ok");

in Java works just fine. Try it out!

New Link Posts courtesy of Google Bookmarks

2010-06-04T15:26:00.000-05:00

With the demise of the Google Notebook extension for Firefox, I've had to start collecting up interesting posts I found via another Google tool -- Google Bookmarks.

While Google Notebook could be used for all sorts of things, all I ever used it for, mostly, was just collecting bookmarks: pages and articles that I found across the web that were interesting enough to share with readers, but not necessarily important enough to bookmark locally in my browser (where I'd put links that I would keep going back to everyday, etc.). I'd collect them in a Notebook, and then export it to HTML and post it here.

Google Bookmarks does about everything I wanted in Google Notebook -- it collects lists of bookmarks. I guess I should be happy, really -- about the only thing I miss is the ability to quickly export a "list" to HTML so that I can post it quickly here.

As is, I'll have to settle for Google Bookmark's "publishing" feature:

Google Bookmarks for May 2010

It'll have to do! Luckily, I can make it public, like so, and anybody can read it.

A Quick and Dirty Production JavaScript File Builder with Windows Batch Programming

2010-05-25T10:52:00.000-05:00

A while back, I needed a simple script to minimize and unite a few javascript source files into one big file to decrease loading times (and just to make things neater). The difficulty level came from the fact that I needed to do this on a Windows server, and most tutorials and whatnot I could find explained it for UNIX/Linux servers.

So, after some research, I decided to use excellent YUI Compressor (found here), and utilizing a few Windows Batch commands I picked up here and there, I created a .BAT file:

echo off
set buildFile=../www/js-lib/app-deploy/final-build-file.js
set libDir=../html/js-lib
set yuiComp=./yuicompressor-2.4.2/build/yuicompressor-2.3.5.jar

FOR %%G IN (file1.js file2.js directory/file3.js) DO (
echo on
Echo Compressing %%G...
echo off

java -jar %yuiComp% --preserve-semi --line-break 100 %libDir%/%%G >> %buildFile%
)

Simply change the directories and file names to what you need (I trust you can figure this out), stick all that into a .BAT file, and then run it from your Windows command line -- it'll create a nice combined javascript source file at the location of "%buildFile%".

Issues: You'll need to delete the older build file whenever you run the batch command each time -- I couldn't find a way to delete a file on the server I was working with (using Windows batch commands), and if you run this batch file without deleting the older build file it creates first, it'll simply append your new build file onto the end of the old one!

Links:
BATCH FILE COMMANDS: Simple programming commands in a batch environment
Introduction to the Windows Command Prompt
MS DOS Copy Command Help

Fixed Code Blocks

2010-05-25T09:37:00.001-05:00

The wonderful JavaScript library I've been using courtesy of AlexGorbatchev.com to display inline code here on my blog, responsible for blocks of code like this:

function () {
    alert("Hello world!");
}

Hasn't been working on my blog for the past few weeks (or longer, maybe), but it's fixed now. All code examples now show up correctly.

Interested in using it for your own blog? Go here: http://alexgorbatchev.com (There's even a hosted version for users of Blogger.com.)

Hitting close at home

2010-04-28T13:51:00.003-05:00

Just saw today on Ed Brill's blog about a few remarks made by the TwiT folks in regards to Lotus Notes! Sadly, though, the remarks were the usual 90's-era Notes complaints:

"The UI is ugly."

"Who uses that?"

I actually really like and respect the Twit guys, and try to catch their podcasts every chance I get (I apparently missed this episode in question, though).

I encounter this stuff all the time -- if it isn't constant insults from users at Slashdot, it's little inside jokes like this (see if you can find it). The worst insult was the one that Notes was "even worse than Exchange" -- sorry, no! I've used both, and Exchange is worse, and that's not just bias, either.

Luckily, Jeff Jarvis redeems himself in this post at this blog from yesterday:

Now as for Lotus: In their office, Jeff Schick and a colleague generously spent a few hours giving me a tour of what they can do. I'll concede: It's impressive. What impressed me is that IBM integrated the functions of the collaborative, social internet -- email, Twitter, wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook Connect, directories, blogs, calendars, Skype, bookmarks, tagging -- in a way that I wish they would all interroperate: click on a name and get everything about them (contact, place, tags, bookmarks); pull together people in calls or calendars just by dragging them; see how people are sharing your documents; see how people are connected....

Looks like I'll have to keep checking back at the weekly TWIG podcast to see if they mention this matter again. ;)

Links:
http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/have-you-been-following-the-why-does-howard-stern-use-notes-discussion
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/04/27/sternshow-digital-farts/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOn5XEz6DHs&feature=related

Terrific

2010-04-08T13:41:00.002-05:00

Q: Are you concerned about leaving out your older customer base (with the lack of features for older devices).

A: (Steve) Well, a lot of these products that are out there are the most recent products. The old devices will get the update, but they'll miss some of these features like multitasking. If that's an incentive for them to upgrade to a new device... terrific.
[Source]

Yeah... terrific.

Year of the Android

2010-02-18T08:37:00.001-06:00

Oh, I firmly agree.

MWC 2010: The Year of the Android | Gadget Lab | Wired.com:

"But the general consumer doesn’t care. They just buy the phone and get apps from either the handset maker or their carrier (if they add apps at all). They probably don’t even know they have an “Android phone”.

The real customer for Android? It’s the handset manufacturers. They have been given a customizable, powerful and actively developed OS, and they get it free. Better, they can put in on any device they like. And this is what Microsoft is up against with its fussy new Windows Mobile 7, which has the cheek to specify minimum hardware requirements. Forget about the iPhone. Microsoft is in a death-match with Google and its free OS."

Apple is not Android's "competitor." Apple's iPhone is a closed hardware-software package -- you can't take the iPhone OS and run it on anything other than an iPhone. Thus, as far as the OS is concerned, no one is "competing" with the iPhone.

Where Apple competes is on the total mobile phone market front, and there they are competing against companies like Motorola, HTC, LG, etc. Not "Android" -- no company "owns" Android, thus it isn't competing against anyone, unless you're talking about a philosophical open-source/closed-source "war" with Microsoft and their Windows Mobile OS.

I have no problem with Android phones becoming the vast majority of cell phones -- this won't stifle innovation like a Microsoft monopoly did in the PC market. Like I said, no one company owns Android, and no one is stopped from taking it, changing it, and then releasing it in any personalized form they want to.

YouTube - A Splendid Endeavour!

2010-02-08T10:17:00.000-06:00

...and there you go. The last nighttime launch of the space shuttle any of us will ever see.

YouTube - A Splendid Endeavour!

Palm Pre Development

2010-01-29T15:32:00.006-06:00

With the release of Palm's online development IDE for the Palm webOS, the Ares Project, I couldn't help but be drawn to do a little quick webOS development. What I found was amazing.

Development for the Palm webOS is really, really easy. Like stupidly easy -- and if you're a web developer, it's even easier.

Trust me -- open an account, take a look at the first tutorial, grab the SDK and virtual machine (it's like a little Palm Pre, just for you), and have fun!

I performed a few modifications to the code that Palm provided for their tutorial -- it was a basic app that searched for photos on Flickr, displayed them in a list, and then allowed you to view each photo, one at a time.

I changed it around a little bit to:

1) show each photo, but also allow you to flick left and right to navigate between the photos in the result se

2) have a counter at the top, showing you which photo you were on

3) allow you to also "tap" each photo to go to the next one in the result set

4) hit Enter to search (on the Palm keypad, I'm guessing) when you're on the initial search screen.

Here's a link to the final .ipk file (Palm's webOS packaging, I'm guessing): http://www.filefront.com/15455695/com.mycompany.flickrsearch_1.0.0_all.ipk.zip

There's no licensing for it, as it wasn't my code to begin with. :P Just import it right into Ares, and take a look around.

Google Docs Forms - Why was I not told of this?

2010-01-14T11:03:00.000-06:00

First, take a look at the picture above. Wow, an easy, information-storing, web-based form editor? That's pretty neat -- kinda useless without a backend to support it, though, right? Right?

...and it looks like the backend is automatic. The form is loaded up, and the data is automatically collected and stored in a Google Spreadsheet. Simple as that.

Google's apparently trying to put me out of a job. :P

localStorage

2009-12-09T11:13:00.000-06:00

Lately I've been doing a bit of work with the new "localStorage" browser variable that's part of the HTML5 spec. It allows you to store key/value pairs by just setting them as a property of the "localStorage" window variable, up to a total size of 10MB (I think).

The variable is accessed on a per-domain basis, and is maintained after browser shutdown. (A similiar variable called "sessionStorage" does the exact same thing but is erased at every browser shutdown or window close.)

Pretty amazing to anyone who's spent years storage little bits of data in 4KB cookies over the years, I tell you what. Now, usually I stay away from developments such as these, mostly because Microsoft's Internet Explorer never supports them, and 90% of my development is spent in IE.

However, imagine when my surprise when I found out that Microsoft, for whatever reason, actually decided to adopt the HTML5 localStorage spec in IE8.

Surprised the hell out of me. Once I learned that Safari 4, Chrome 4, and Firefox 3.5 also support the HTML5 localStorage spec, I decided to adopt it in my coding.

Ah, but what about IE6? Or FF2? For that, I turned to a little library I found called PersistJS that, while it hadn't been updated for 2 years, looked like it would do the trick. It supposedly supports a myriad of various browser storage techniques, stepping down from each to a lesser version depending upon what it finds supported in its environment.

Still trying to get it to work, however -- like I said, the library is several years old, and while I did find its github repository, it's still mostly in development and doesn't seem to work quite well yet. If it wasn't for IE6 (and Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.0.x, to a lesser degree), I'd probably just scrap the idea of using an external library, and just go on to using the native localStorage spec.

(...this might be a perfect opportunity to drop support for IE6, don't you think?)

Google Notebook May Be Dying. For Real This Time.

2009-12-08T10:33:00.002-06:00

...and the menus on the Google Notebook website aren't working anymore in Firefox 3.6b4. Uh oh -- this doesn't look good.

Google Notebook for Firefox 3.6

2009-11-24T14:45:00.002-06:00

Officially, Google dropped support for the Notebook extension with version 3.0 of Firefox, but you were able to get it working in Firefox 3.5 with this hack.

However, I've been using the Firefox 3.6 Beta for a while now, and the performance is degraded. The extension seems to still allow you to bookmark a page without going to http://notebook.google.com, but the popup doesn't register any mouseclicks.

I'm currently in the process of creating a Firefox dev environment, just to keep this extension working -- that's one way to cut my teeth on Firefox extension development, I guess. :P

VMWare Email Subscription Change Request

2009-11-13T10:34:00.000-06:00

Received this message after changing my VMWare account preferences to stop accepting their (spam) newsletters, training requests, and special offers.

Apparently their email subscription manager server is running in a Windows 3.1 VM.

...or else they're still processing them by hand. Which makes me even happier than I now use Virualbox.

Facebook iPhone Dev Quits Project Over Apple Tyranny

2009-11-12T09:10:00.002-06:00

Facebook iPhone Dev Quits Project Over Apple Tyranny

My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.
The web is still unrestricted and free, and so I am returning to my roots as a web developer. In the long term, I would like to be able to say that I helped to make the web the best mobile platform available, rather than being part of the transition to a world where every developer must go through a middleman to get their software in the hands of users.

Wow -- just wow. I know Joe Hewitt -- he's also the guy that made Firebug; the tool that pretty much revolutionized web development as we knows it. I didn't know he was also responsible for the excellent and very, very popular Facebook app for the iPhone. (How about bringing some of that love over to Android, Joe? Our facebook apps leave much to be desired. Even the "official" one.)

Makes sense, though -- Joe Hewitt is also the fellow who made the open IUI JavaScript framework, which enables you to effectively create web applications that run in the iPhone's Mobile Safari browser that mimic a native application. Who needs the app store? :P

Even though I've been creating a bit of mobile web apps here and there, I've never once considered creating a native "app" or dealing with Apple's App Store -- why bother creating a native Apple App, when I can create a great looking web app that looks the same AND works in Blackberry's mobile browser, Android's mobile browser, Windows Mobile, etc...

Oh, but it's still not as good as a native app, you say? Joe Hewitt addresses that very point in a blog post he made about this subject a few months ago:

Oh, but you say that iPhone apps are different, because they run native code and can do scary things that web pages can't? Again, you're wrong, because iPhone apps are sandboxed and have scarcely any more privileges than a web app. About the only scary thing they can do outside the sandbox is access your address book, but Apple can easily fix that by requiring they ask permission first, just like they must do to track your location.

And, to the argument (one that even I've gave Apple from time to time) that Apple restricting apps in its horrible approval process somehow makes the platform "safer":

The fact is this: Apple does not have the means to perform thorough quality assurance on any app. This is up to the developer. We have our own product managers and quality assurance testers, and we are liable to our users and the courts if we do anything evil or stupid. Apple may catch a few shallow bugs in the review process, but let's face it, the real things they are looking for are not bugs, but violations of the terms of service. This is all about lawyers, not quality, and it shows that the model of Apple's justice system is guilty until proven innocent. They don't trust us, and I resent that, because the vast majority of us are trustworthy.