Red Wolf mailed me a most interesting link over the weekend, highlighting a pair of iPhone apps of interest to observant Jews with a food fetish.
iBlessing ... shows a plate filled with food--no traif, of course. Clicking on the meat, fruit, bread, wine, etc., brings up the blessing you should say over the item in question. The app has additional bonus blessings
as well, for events like hand washing and the after meal grace.
The other application is of no use to vegan Jews whatsoever, being to do with the prohibition on eating meat and dairy together.
ParveOMeter, counts down the amount of time until you can eat dairy after meat and vice versa. The milk to meat setting is customisable depending on how kosher you are (zero minutes to an hour), but the meat to milk timer keeps ticking for six whole hours. The app keeps you on track too, since there is no easy way to manually stop the timer.
But there's others, that Gizmodo chose not to highlight! KosherMe is
... a beautiful Bentscher for your iPhone. It puts the Blessings ("Brachot") you should say before and after eating something (including Birkat Hamazon) right at your fingertips.
Additionally KosherMe contains a (growing) number of wonderful prayers and blessings, e.g. the Complete Bedtime Shma, Tfillat Haderech and other useful blessings.
Then there's Siddur:
Take your weekday siddur with you with this feature-packed Jewish prayer book. You'll get Ashkenaz, Sfrard and Sefarad Mizrachi versions of davening, including weekday Shacharis, Mincha, Maariv, standard Brachos and more. Real time Zmanim will give you the prayer times for each day based on your location determined with the iPhone's GPS. A Minyanim database will help you find nearest shul. A Luach or Jewish Calendar will aid you in your prayer services.
... and Tehilim, which is a mobile version of the Psalms. Just remember to not use any of these between sunset Friday and sunset Saturday.
iBlessing and ParveOMeter iPhone Apps Make You a Kosher Keeping Mensch—Gizmodo Australia, 18th August 2008.