Why online if it can work offline?

I have lost count of how many times in the last 12 months Costa Rica have been experiencing problems with the international links.

Today we are experiencing slowness again, which makes me think about the risks of relying too much on online services like Gmail and 37 Signals products, just to mention a couple of them.

Web applications are really useful but at least for some of us in this world, we should really think about the risks of having too much important information online and find a way of accessing the data without being connected.

Gmail provides POP access to all your email which at least gives you an alternative that you could frequently use to download your emails to your computer, Yahoo requires a payed account to make that happen. In the case of more sophisticated applications like Basecamp, it could get a little more complicated.

A couple of years ago when I began playing with the idea of coding my own future, I thought about implementing a couple of applications for the web but then I thought a little more about it: if an application can be used locally without requiring online access it should be written in that way. Why force the risks, scaling and security nightmares and many other things present in online applications, just for the sake of it?

If an application can work offline, that should be the preferred mode.