mac.iLounge

It feels great to hit the Genius button in iTunes and get a perfect playlist. Now imagine if you could do the same thing with YouTube videos—start on one cute cat video and wind up with an endless stream of paws and whiskers just waiting to eat your day away. That’s exactly what you’ll get with Minitube ($10) from developer Flavio Tordini. It’s a desktop YouTube viewer that offers a totally new way to watch Google’s time-sucking video vault.

Just pop in a keyword and Minitube will start playing related videos, one after another. Luckily, it’s pretty easy on your system. Instead of relying on Flash as YouTube does in the browser, the app takes advantage of QuickTime on your machine, so it can run videos at 1080p with no problem. While Minitube is available through the Mac App Store, buying directly from Tordini’s website does have an advantage: the version offered there allows one-click downloads of any of the videos that you are watching, with automatic MPEG4 conversion.