What's a conduit?
What's a conduit and do I need one?
A conduit is a program that resides on your desktop computer and synchronizes the data in your Palm with some particular data your computer has access to. Out of the box, a Palm comes with conduits for synchronizing the built in apps (Date Book, etc) with Palm Desktop. Several companies produce conduits for synchronizing the Palm to other applications such as PIMs, Quicken and others. A more exotic example is the AvantGo MobileLink conduit, which goes out on the Internet to fetch specialized web pages for offline viewing on your Palm.
If you want to make a Palm app that either interacts with an existing program on your desktop, or you want to make a program that has both a Palm and a desktop component, you will need to either use the Generic Conduit Manager or you will have to make a full-fledged conduit.