Coola

3) When you enter your address, an entry is added to your account that you requested Coolet #x

4) When you sync, the conduit passes your username to the database and requests any unsynced Coolets.

5) These Coolets are added to your Palm

It sounds simple. But a lot of things can go wrong. The conduit is only supported on Windows. Anyone who syncs solely on a Macintosh cannot use the service. The conduit does not work well with some firewalls. In fact, in the several months I've known about Coola and tried to use it, last Friday was the very first time I got it to work.

There are also other inconveniences. Coola always puts all of its memo and address entries in the Unfiled category. If you use categories heavily this could become irritating in a real hurry. Since the Coola database maintains user information for every user, I see no reason to not maintain a list of categories for memos and address (and perhaps Doc files, although not every Doc reader supports categories) if the user choses to define them. It would add one more step to the process -- ideally after you send Coola your email address it would return to ask you for a category if you have enabled categories.

Don't get me wrong. Coola as it stand now is a good start. Just the fact that I can get the information in some format more-or-less without any work on my part is wonderful. The fact that I can go online anywhere and know that data I select will be added to my Palm when I get home is nice. But now it's time to add support for categories. It's time to add Macintosh support. It's time to add better firewall support. In order to be a truly mobile solution, Coola needs to both allow me to get data from anywhere and sync it from anywhere. The first is progressing nicely. The second part needs some more work.

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