Inquisitor 3: now in Beta, Free

Just a quick update, hopefully one of a few tonight — the beta of Inquisitor 3 is out for Safari, and is free. For those not in the know, Inquisitor is sort of like autocomplete for your Safari searches, on crack. Or like spotlight for the web. A friend’s been using it for a while, but I couldn’t personally justify spending the money on it as a poor poor student. Now I’ll give it a shot, and so should you.

Puzzler — maybe solved?

I’ve been thinking a little bit more about this MacUpdate Promo deal that came up a few days ago, and I realize that there’s something I should’ve considered that I haven’t thought of before: macZOT has been sucking recently. I loved the woot.com-style “one day-one deal” thing, and when the mysteries had hints that were guessable but tricky, they were acceptable. But they’ve been doing these 5-day long things, and sneaking repeats in mysteryZOTs and all this other stuff that is sort of cute when it’s rare but gets really old really fast. So if MacUpdate does what macZOT used to do and now fails to, I’m in.

A puzzler from Macupdate

Today MacUpdate launched a new thing called MacUpdate Promo, which does 24-hour steep discount sales on popular mac software. Um — how is this different from macZOT!, and if it’s not different why are they bothering? I suspect that most people who care about the sort of thing macZOT! does already know about it, so I doubt that the additional audience of MacUpdate will do them any good here (and who reads the MacUpdate charts regularly, anyway?). It’s not that I don’t think that they’ll make any money from it, but I do think that there are better things they could spend their effort on, given that something like this has been going on (rather successfully) for some time. This one’s a puzzler.

Apple Buying YouTube? Why bother?

For a couple days now, people have been speculating on the notion of Apple purchasing YouTube. There have been arguments from both sides – you can see a pro argument from Robert Young over at GigaOM and a short response from John Gruber over on Daring Fireball. The pro side basically says that YouTube to the video iPod will be the same as the iTMS was to the regular iPod. The con is that YouTube is basically a big repository for copyrighted videos viewable by everyone – and the RIAA and buddies would blow a seal if Apple took part in that.

Mac: Lightsaber form!

My friend Melody pointed out a fun new use for the Mac sudden motion sensors (the ones that stop your HD from spinning if you drop your laptop). Someone put together an app that turns your macbook into a lightsaber. Anyone care to try swinging their mac around in a dark room and see how well it works?