Patent Grabber(TM) 5.7.1 now available

Free update for licensed users.

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.7.1 is now available. This is a minor update to conform Patent Grabber to changes that were made on the USPTO server. Due to these changes on the USPTO server, patents or applications that did not contain drawings would download in their entirety even when the user had only selected specific sections to download. This is now fixed.

Patent Grabber 5.7 is now available

Patent Grabber 5.7 is now available for download from the Blazing Dawn Software web site. As mentioned in my previous posting, this version adds the option of including patent family identifiers in a spreadsheet of bibliographic information for U.S. patents. This is a great convenience when you are reviewing a large portfolio of patents from a single company, as it allows the spreadsheet to be sorted by patent family.

This is a free upgrade for licensed users of Patent Grabber 5.x.

Patent family identifiers being added to US Patent Bibliographic Information in Patent Grabber

I once had to analyze the patent portfolio of a company. They had 179 U.S. patents. So I used Patent Grabber's "US Patent Biblio" feature to start with. That gave me a spreadsheet with the bibliographic information for all 179 patents in a couple of minutes.

But with that many patents, I thought it would be useful to be able to group them into their families. That is why I developed Family-izer(TM). Once I had the family information, I gave each family an arbitrary number and entered those numbers in a new column of the spreadsheet. It took a couple of hours, but when I was done I could sort the spreadsheet by family as well as by any of the other columns.

So now I had a brainstorm. Why spend  a couple of hours entering patent family identifiers, when I could add Family-izer functionality to the US Patent Biblio feature! I should be able to automatically get a spreadsheet that already had each patent family assigned an identifying number. No more manual labor!

I have gotten it working. Now I need just a little more testing. Look for Patent Grabber 5.7 in the near future!

Family-izer now works with international patents!

Starting with Family-izer(TM) 2.4, users are no longer restricted to entering only U.S. patents and published applications in the Family-izer search field! With the simple inclusion of a two-letter country code, users can now start with a patent or publication number from many different countries. 

Go to http://www.blazingdawn.com/demo/family-izer.html and try it out. It's free!

Patent Grabber 5.6.2 now available!

Patent Grabber 5.6.2 is now available. This is a minor update that eliminates the downloading of duplicate pages in some international patents. On the Search screen, it also eliminates run-on words in the text of PCT publications.

Many thanks to Patent Grabber users David and Bob for alerting me to the duplicate page bug!

Production version of Family-izer now available

Blazing Dawn Software's free patent family aggregator, Family-izer, is now out of alpha and in full production. Just click the link on the Blazing Dawn home page.

Family-izer takes a list of U.S. patents and published applications and retrieves the INPADOC patent family for each one. Great if you are looking to organize the patent portfolio of a single company.

All you need to do is download the free revWeb browser plugin from Runtime Revolution, and Family-izer will be at your fingertips any time you need it.

ChecksQuick printing under Snow Leopard??

I received one report from a ChecksQuick user that he was unable to print his checks under Snow Leopard. That turned out to be a false alarm. The user needed to update his printer driver. Once he did that ChecksQuick printed fine under Snow Leopard.

During the time he could not print under Snow Leopard, that user got around the problem by downloading the Windows version and running ChecksQuick under Windows 7 via VMWare Fusion. So ChecksQuick runs fine under Windows 7, too!