To one of your points, I don’t think you can use this generalization of “web apps”, simply because it’s too vague. Google Reader is an good example of something that’s a “web app” and I think is excellent in terms of UI and usability YMMV. Also Google Reader works offline as well as online, using the Google Gears firefox add-on you can read all your blogs from your laptop even when you’re not connected. That’s just one example of how a web app is becoming more than on the web.

And I think you’re right on that computers need to be connected to be useful. Even if you write emails in evo while you’re offline, that doesn’t make a difference if you never get evo connected again. But being able to access my data from anywhere is just a really nice part of using web apps, something that’s not possible in evolution.

The Online Desktop is about creating a desktop environment where your information isn’t lost and is available from more places. Creating a web mail interface could be an option, but it’s also possible to bring evo closer to being an Online Application like that. If evolution were to save my account information to the Online Desktop service, I could get access to my email from most any Linux machine with much less effort than would normally require. And preferences like forwarding messages inline would be saved across these sessions. These seem like simple things, but GMail and other web mail apps already do this. I don’t need to reconfigure them whenever I purchase a new computer.

I like how you’re hitting on an issue that a lot of people raise about moving ever application to the web or into firefox. When really it’s about making applications more connected to web or intenet services and making the desktop more aware of the accounts I posses on different web services so my applications can integrate with them.

http://online-desktop.org/wiki/Online_Desktop

(which is the official wiki for the online desktop)

or here:

http://live.gnome.org/OnlineDesktop

So I’m not quite sure where you got that impression, but it’s definately wrong, PyroDesktop is in no way a part of the GNOME Online Desktop stuff, just because some people might like both, doesn’t mean, that they are the same

You seem to confuse the Online Desktop with Pyrodesktop which is something totally different. Putting the desktop into Firefox was never an idea for the GNOME Online Desktop.