\fR oo m-hāk\ n. Any application of ingenuity for those who are committed to observe the 613 Mitzvot. [ORIGIN: Yiddish פֿרום (frum|fR oo m) meaning "commited to observe the 613 Mitzvot, or Jewish commandments" and the English Slang term HACK (hāk|hak) or LIFEHACK (līf-hāk|lahyf-hak) meaning "anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever/non-obvious way or an appropriate application of ingenuity"]

While writing my post, Hebrew for Android, I went to reference an article I (thought) I had written on Mikledet (http://www.mikledet.com/) the amazing online Javascript based Heberw keyboard, but the article was nowhere to be found! I don’t know how I could have forgotten to share this amazing tools/resource with my fellow Frumhackers, but apparently I did. I guess it is right in time for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur to do teshuva!

The Mikledet keyboard is and amazing tool, it is basically a simple web-based application that allows you to type in Hebrew without any special software of settings, the Javascript “hi-jacks” your keyboard and whatever key you hit while your cursor is in the text area is converted to the corresponding Hebrew character. It even has an on-screen keyboard for reference which lights up as you type. The app also allows you to switch from the classic Hebrew keyboard layout to phonetic layout. It is really awesome for those times you need to write an email response in Hebrew or do a quick Google search. There is even a Facebook app which allows you to access the keyboard from within Facebook for convenience while communicating with Hebrew speakers.

Mikledet is developed by Chen Levkovich, and Israeli from Tel Aviv, here is a quote from the about us page:

I created Mikledet.com mostly for myself (and my wife). We lived in Munich at the time, without any P.C. at home. I connected to the Internet mostly from Internet cafes, which of course had no Hebrew support. We had no possibility to send Hebrew emails, until I created Mikledet.com (well at the beginning the name was e-vrit and then just Mikledet). I wrote all the initial code at the easy Internet cafe next to Munich’s central station, and at the time I used my home page at geocities.

He has also developed 2 other amazing apps, http://skypetranslate.com/, an app to translate Skype conversations to and from Hebrew, and http://www.muftah-alhuruf.com/, an Arabic keyboard similar to Mikledet (very useful for doing searches of Gaonic Literature in the original Arabic ).

Now that I have written the article that I (thought) had written before, I can tell you that Android 2.2 (Froyo) which I just updated to supports Hebrew and supports the Mikledet mobile and regular keyboards!

[Mikledet] [Mikledet Facebook App]