One of the hottest gadgets around is the small, hand-held computer.
A few short years ago, one popular version began as the Pilot, then the PalmPilot. The latest is the Palm III by Silicon Valley’s 3Com Corp.
And now there is a compilation of Jewish software for it called PilotYid.
Among the applications available are Jewish calendars to overwrite the datebook in the Palm, the weekly Torah reading, software that allows one to track the moon phases for Rosh Chodesh and candle-lighting times. You can remember anniversaries of Hebrew dates, keep track of yahrzeits, and follow all the Jewish holidays.
Aaron “Ari” Engel, a 21-year-old Yeshiva University junior majoring in computer science, created the Web site, from which the software can be downloaded.
The site debuted in November. Its two Web addresses are http://welcome.to/PilotYid and http://members.aol.com/ari11210/pilot
Most of the downloads are free, and they work in any other product that runs on the Palm OS, such as the IBM Workpad.
About two years ago, Engel purchased his own Pilot and watched “as all sorts of software trickled out.” Shortly thereafter, a Jewish calendar program called Tamar — Hebrew for “date palm” — was introduced.
“That’s when I realized that there must be other Jewish Pilot users out there. Then, very slowly, I saw that other Jewish software was coming out for the Pilot.”
A few months later, he had the idea to somehow install the Grace After Meals and the Traveler’s Prayer into his Pilot. After completing that task, he put both of the files that he had created for the prayers up on one of the PalmPilot Web sites so that other people could download and use them.
“I was actually quite surprised to see how may people were downloading them,” he said. “The number was much higher than I thought it would be, and I was getting `thank you’ e-mails from Jewish people all over the globe.”