Argh.

[prog]

I have got a brilliant idea for a world-improving Internet application, and now I see that Cue Cats apparently no longer exist. That stinks.

Has anything else appeared to fill in this niche?

Update

A modicum of research has revealed the sad story of Cue Cat. Apparently they were the loss leader for something that never quite got of the ground, but people with the proper motivation can find them all over eBay, dirt-cheap.

Meanwhile, you can certainly get a brand-new barcode scanner for any OS you wish (even Mac OS X), so long as you're willing to part with ~$275. I know I would be, if sufficiently motiviated. And I think I am, but JohnK has offered to loan me his CueCat for a month or two, which is very nice of him. If I can crack the codes it generates (a task I bet is but a Google search away) I can use it for my immediate feasibility studies.

I'm just a little sad because the app I have it mind would be driven by an army of wand-waving geeks, something that is not so easy to assemble than I had hoped... but then again, the sorts of people who would use this app are probably the sorts of people who would go out of their way to get a cheap barcode reader from an obscure source, too.

Well. Enough vapor-talk for now.

Comments

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I in fact have a CueCat on my desk just waiting for someone to come up with something clever to do with it. I acquired it because of Andrew Plotkin; I'll point you to http://www.eblong.com/zarf/bookscan/index.html, in the hope that it might help you figure out what codes the things generate and how to read them.