>Is there an offline reader/reply tool for the Universal Thread? Will the UT's upcoming web services expose a sufficient enough API to support such a capability?
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>I spend a lot of time traveling and my time on the road will only increase in the future. What I'm looking for is a tool that would allow me to download a group of messages (by date range/forums), review and reply to these messages offline, and then 'resynch' with the UT when I have an opportunity to reconnect to the internet.

We had one before. It's infrastructure was costing too much to be support. The biggest problem, which can be seen as an advantage for most of the members, is that the online interface is evolving too fast, thus we can't afford to support additional interface (at least, not for written) to the Universal Thread. We received so many feedback about users that weren't able to benefit of the same set of features we have online in UTNav. We provided a simple interface. But, users wanted to have all the benefits they have online and that would have represented to have one full time person to maintain UTNav in parallel as this is what it takes to maintain the online version. So, the time wasted to support it and to answer all those requests was just going nowhere.

The release of the Web Service, as specified at the top of the document, is for the purpose of reading only and obtain some other types of content such as the list of upcoming user group meetings and query for users online. The Web Service can be interpreted differently as UTNav. As we provide a Web Service, this means we only have to maintain the online version and not the client side. It means users are able to do whatever they want with the interface. We provide a basic simple as a startup and then users can decide to configure it to fit their own needs. But, we specify that this is for reading only. We do not accept any incoming data. Delivering content is something that we can do pretty fast. When it comes time to accept incoming data, this is where the biggest part of the maintenance is. The same is true for the Web interface. Whatever we provide which is read only represents about 10% of the effot of what cause in the opposite.

So, the online interface is the interface to use for the contribution. The Web Service is not a replacement of it. However, the features provided by the Web Service are quite cool. This brings additional benefits to members who use it for specific needs.