FIGURE B

Lists are neatly displayed on both the PC and Palm screens. Click picture for a larger image.

Synchronization
As always with an application that has records, I worry that my information won't be synchronized properly. ListPro promises record-level synchronization, so that I could, say, change one task's date on the Palm and check off a different task on the desktop, and it delivers.

Changing the same record on both platforms results in the last change being kept. This makes sense, but I would have liked to be informed when I synchronized that I had changed both records, as if I'd done it accidentally I would have lost information.

Other features
The software allows creating live links in a list item, which can take you to a Web site or allow you to dial a phone number or send an email. Creating a Web site link worked fine for me, but I wasn't able to make the other two happen.

My laptop doesn't have a modem so it can't dial, but it should have been able to send an email. Whenever I clicked an email link, though, I got an error message that Windows couldn't find the specified file. My Treo didn't see the links as links, so it wasn't able to dial or send an email either.

I had more success with the alarm functionality. Once you enable alarms for a particular list, the desktop will alert you when tasks are due. The Palm does not display the alarms. As my lists are primarily reference ones, I'm not sure how often I'd use this feature, but if you're frequently at your computer and need to be reminded to complete certain tasks, it would be useful.

List items can have a note field attached, and this note field can include text formatting, links, and images. At least, it can as long as you're not synchronizing to a Palm handheld. I created a test file that wasn't synchronized to my Palm, and the note field formatting worked as expected.

Overall opinion
With the exception of the live link feature, I found ListPro to be exceptionally solid. It isn't particularly flashy, but the implementation is strong and it does exactly what it promises.

ListPro's rating is four out of five.

OUR RATING: 4 of 5

Movie Collector also nicely integrates with ListPro, which is why we're mentioning it here. If you do want to use ListPro with Movie Collector, there's a special discount the two companies offer.

Our only complaint about Movie Collector is that the format seems to change from version to version, which means there's always something of a challenge trying to open up an already-configured movie collection. Beyond that, the product is extremely complete and quite helpful to use. We give Movie Collector a four out of five as well.

OUR RATING: 4 of 5

Heather Wardell received her first Palm handheld in 1997 (from a boss who couldn't get the hang of Graffiti) and has never looked back. She worked in banking as a systems analyst for four years, and then moved into elementary education, teaching computers at a private elementary school for four years. Heather is now a full-time writer with two main specialties: articles that explain how a particular technology works, and short stories that usually involve technology run amok. You can reach her on the Web at http://www.heatherwardell.com.