My clients have lots of situations where they need to work disconnected. It's a very large and diverse group. There is flying in airplane as has been mentioned. There is working at home, where they may have cable, dial-up, or nothing at all, but they certainly are NOT allowed to VPN in to the corporate network. Or if they are, they may need to work and there is an outage, either Internet or power. They may need to go into businesses to do presentations. Sure, the business may have Internet, but do you know how hard it is to get access to some of these corporate networks? Or to tunnel through all their security layers and into the network of the presenter? A lot of companies do not allow Joe Schmo to just walk in, plug into the wall, and have web access.
I think this is just a dichotomy between programmers and the real world, it is not a shiny happy place where anybody can plug in anywhere, anytime. I have been struggling for a while to come up with an ideal, or even easily workable solution to using the same app for disconnected, partially connected, and totally connected and keeping everything synched up in a 100% reliable fashion.
