CueCat | Hacker News Reader

CueCat

en.wikipedia.org

10 pointsalex_c10 comments

I still have mine right here. It's sitting next to my monitor. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to scan correctly anymore, but I wrote a few windows apps back in the day to catalog my CD collection and even one that talked to iTunes that would play a particular album when I scanned it. I really wish I could find a working one.

I got a working one about a year ago from here as a curiosity:

http://www.librarything.com/cuecat

Wish I knew about them in college - would've made my temp job organizing a small department library much easier.

I got one of the free cue cats back when they mailed them to all wired participants. I remember that seemed like an incredibly expensive thing to do, I set up the product and scanned a few things but quickly became bored with it. It seems like there are so may other better ways to do something similar...

I got a bunch for Radio Shack and got bored with them quickly.

I think that was around the time the i-Opener came out the $99 Internet appliance that people noticed had a hard drive header and accessible bios:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener

I got one the same way! I was pretty young at that time so it was really exciting until I, too, realized how useless it was... and now my android phone does it all and more!

I remember having exactly the same experience.

It was an interesting technological toy. But something was missing, and it sank quickly. I cannot quite figure out what was wrong. Most likely not on the technical side.

CueCat is now just Wikipedia lore? I feel old. Those things were a favorite hack target for a couple of years in college....

Not sure if it was distributed outside the US, I would guess not... so it's (mostly) new to me. The kinds of things we miss out on, up here in Canada ;)

One of my clients is making an app (non-public) where everything is done by handing out cards with barcodes, which are then scanned in.

We were very close to buying a couple thousand cuecats for it. I don't remember why we didn't, I think because they were not reliable (sliding the wand, vs. point and click for the gun types).

That would make a good iPhone app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com