For the 125-day event, employees wear pedometers and measure their daily step count. They then enter those steps into an event-specific website to embark on a virtual journey around the world. Used daily by more than 50,000 participants across three continents, F/F were asked by Flash Group to develop the online direction for the 2008 version of the site which incorporated an integrated Flash and Javascript framework.

Built and developed by the in house team at Flash Group the final site presented a great example of seamless technology integration.

We’re very pleased to announce that Adobe have chosen the site as today’s ‘Site Of The Day‘.

A big well done to everyone involved.

Pownce – essentially an instant messaging app with better options for sending and sharing larger files + an online presence like a mini blog. Built with Adobe Air

Ebay Desktop – a slicker richer experience than the now very out of date Ebay website. This has the obvious benefit offline interactions when not connected to the web. Built with Adobe Air

Google Analytics – this best of class analytics system ins brought to the desktop again as an Adobe Air application.

Destroy Flickr – brings Flickr to the desktop, providing a richer experience for viewing your photo-content. It includes uploading tools. Built with Adobe Air.

Evernote – pretty essential to getting the most out of Evernote is it’s desktop app. This allows you to drag and drop organise, edit and add content from your computer and syncs between it and the online account when connected to the web.

A simple sweeping assessment is that one way or another once internet connections are fast/robust enough to deliver it then surely the web browser as such will essentially become an alternative operating system.

The way we see it there are certain commercial considerations that could drive such a move, the primary one being license control. This new web based system environment would deliver a digital world where licensing issues would no longer be an issue as the applications would be served directly via the web and not installed locally – access would demand a genuine login via a paid subscription. Commercial users would no doubt be able to buy a for life key/login but amateur users would have the option of pay per use on applications. Photoshop Express by Adobe already shows that the software houses are thinking in terms of web apps, and out of the box subscription on a per use basis already exists for some products, such as photoshop, in the offline world.

Google apps is another pointer in this direction – the notion of creating a system like environment online that can service all you needs – mail, calendar, simple document creation.

Yet we are still seeing daily releases of new desktop apps that essentially take the need to log on to the web out of the equation for site based tasks such as uploading images to Flickr, writing a blog post to WordPress or Twittering with the Twhirl. In some cases such as the Destroy Flickr Air app the whole online experience it brought to the desktop not just the uploading/creating features. So how come – if the web is becoming all powerful in terms of the functionality and services it can provide why are people developing desktop versions of web apps. Simply because connectivity is still a huge issue.

Broadband still isn’t universally great – here in Australia it is on the whole average, wireless broadband is an even lesser proposition again and in many markets relatively expensive, and with poor coverage. What desktop applications allow the user to do is download a dump of information when connected and then use, edit consume that information while offline – while commuting for example. Yet it would seem at some point the delivery of online connectivity will reach a point where these offline versions just become redundant – raising again the question of the web browser becoming operating system of the future.