Sunday, December 19, 2010

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.8.4 is now available

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.8.4 for Mac OS X and Windows is now available. This release fixes a bug in the Sortable List function for U.S. patent search results. This is a free upgrade for licensed users. Just go to the Patent Tools page of the Blazing Dawn Software web site.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.8.3 is now available

Patent Grabber 5.8.3 is now available for download from the Patent Tools page of the Blazing Dawn Software web site. This release adds further details to Patent Grabber's international patent status report that will help users understand the legal status of the patent in many European countries. Also, search results that are displayed in Patent Family format now have a description of each family member's Kind Code.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

FAMILY-IZER now has its own web site!

Blazing Dawn's FAMILY-IZER patent family retrieval tool now has its own web site! Just go to www.familyizer.com to use it.

FAMILY-IZER is great for analyzing the patent portfolio of a company since it does not simply keep repeating the same family info over and over again for patents that are members of a single family. Instead, it provides the entire family once, and then refers back to that family for each subsequent patent that is a member.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

ChecksQuick(TM) 3.2.1 for Windows is now available

ChecksQuick 3.2.1 fixes a bug that effects Windows users, only, especially Windows 7 users. This is a free upgrade for licensed users.

Mac OS X users can continue to use Version 3.2.

Download links for Mac OS X and Windows are on the Blazing Dawn "Household" page.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Patent Grabber 5.8.2 is now available

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.8.2 is now available for download. This update adjusts for a change made by the European Patent Office that prevented the downloading of EP, PCT and International patents. This is a free upgrade for licensed users.

Go to the Blazing Dawn Software Patent Tools page to download.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.8.1 is now available

Patent Grabber 5.8.1 is now available for download. Several minor issues were addressed in this update. It is a free upgrade for licensed users:
  • Windows version should now retain "licensed" state for all users under Windows 7.
  • Brought back case insensitivity for U.S. patent numbers that start with letters, such as reissue patents.
  • The "Check for Updates" button will now work from behind a proxy server if one is entered into Preferences.
Download a copy now?

Saturday, September 4, 2010

ChecksQuick(TM) 3.2 is now available

ChecksQuick 3.2 is now available for download. Here is what's new:

- Check amounts of up to 99,999.99 can now be used.
- A new dropdown button on each Payment Card allows users to quickly jump to a specific card.

New Check Layout Option:

- Landscape feeding of checks is now supported on left and right-feeding printers through the addition of a y-Offset adjustment. Previously, landscape feeding was only supported on center-feeding printers.

This is a free upgrade for licensed users. For licensed Mac users, ChecksQuick 3.2 should automatically open in its licensed state.

Licensed Windows users will likely have to enter their username and license codes, since the location of Preferences had to be changed to allow for compatibility with Windows 7. To use your old Layout files, you will need to move them from the root directory where they currently reside to a special folder that depends on which version of Windows you are using. Contact the author for assistence, if needed.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Second beta of ChecksQuick 3.2

A second beta of ChecksQuick 3.2 is now available for download. In addition to supporting non-center-feeding printers to feed checks in landscape orientation, beta 2 adds support for checks of greater than $9999.99. Not that I routinely write checks for more than that, but at least one ChecksQuick user had requested that feature. So here it is!

You can download beta 2 from the following links:

Mac OS X (From Tiger to Snow Leopard)

Windows (From 2000 to 7)

Please let me have your comments and/or suggestions.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

ChecksQuick 3.2 beta now available

I finally started upgrading ChecksQuick(TM). A beta of Version 3.2 is now available. For all users, this version adds a y-Offset (in addition to the present x-Offset) so that checks can be fed in landscape orientation (shorter-side first) into printers that feed from the right or left side. Previously, landscape orientation was only supported on center-feeding printers.

This version also moves the preferences and check layout files for Windows users to avoid any incompatibility with Windows 7.

Download the beta from one of the following links:

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Released Patent Grabber 5.8!

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.8 is now available. This version adds full-text searching of EP-A applications (limited to 30 hits). It more importantly fixes the downloading issues with EP, PCT and International patent documents that had been caused by changes at the European Patent Office.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Downloading EP-A, PCT and pre-2002 EP-B temporarily broken

Those mischievous folks at the EPO have done it again! Minor changes to their coding has broken Patent Grabber's ability to download EP-A and PCT applications, as well as pre-2002 EP-B patents. The fix is trivial but tedious. A new version will be available shortly.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

EPO servers appear to be back to normal!

The EPO's servers that Patent Grabber relies upon appear to be working normally again. Hopefully they will stay that way!

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

EPO confirms that Open Patent Services is experiencing problems

The European Patent Office has confirmed that their Open Patent Services (OPS) server is experiencing problems.

For Patent Grabber(TM) users, this will likely cause problems with downloading EP published applications, EP granted patents earlier than 1999, and INPADOC legal status summaries. It will also cause problems for the "Include family identifiers" option of the U.S. Patent Biblio spreadsheet. For reviewing search results, there will be problems with using the "Biblio" and "Family" radio buttons that are next to the search results field.

We will let you know when the issue has been resolved.

Monday, May 10, 2010

EPO's Open Patent Services experiencing problems?

Seems the last few days that service from the EPO's "Open Patent Services" server has been very spotty. This affects the downloading of EP-A images and pre-2001 EP-B images as well as INPADOC legal status summaries. In the search function, this also will affect the viewing of bibliographic and patent family information for both U.S. and PCT search results.

This is not a Patent Grabber issue, and hopefully the problem will be cleared up soon.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Update on Patent Grabber EP-A search feature

Proof of concept for EP-A searching has been accomplished. Now comes the hard part, integrating it smoothly into the other pieces of the Patent Grabber search system.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Working on full text EP-A searching for Patent Grabber

The next new feature for Patent Grabber(TM) that I am working on is full text searching of published applications from the European Patent Office; the so-called "EP-A" publications. This is a feature that was requested by several users, and I am hopeful that I will be able to add it soon.

Patent Grabber 5.7.4 is now available

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.7.4 fixes a bug that prevented certain INPADOC legal status summaries from successfully downloading. The problem only occurred when a patent or application was published more than once with different "Kind Codes" using the same publication number.


Friday, April 2, 2010

Revised build of Patent Grabber 5.7.3

If the title bar of your Patent Grabber 5.7.3 shows "-09" then please download again. Build 09 did not update on small function (patent family identifiers for the US Biblio feature). That was corrected in Build 10. Sorry for any inconvenience.


Sunday, March 28, 2010

Family-izer 2.5 adds two columns of statistical info

Version 2.5 of Family-izer™ adds two columns of statistical information. The first column shows the total number of family members (sure beats counting them by hand!). For the "International" option, the second column shows the number of unique countries and/or regions that are in the family. This gives a rough sense of the scope of foreign filing for a patent. For the "US only" option, the second column will always be blank.

Try Family-izer today!

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Patent Grabber 5.7.3 is now available

We have just released Patent Grabber(TM) 5.7.3. This is another maintenance release to respond to changes made by the European Patent Office to their Open Patent Services server.

All users must upgrade if they wish to maintain the ability to download EP, PCT and International patents as well as INPADOC legal status information after the EPO's cut off date of March 31.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Patent Grabber 5.7.2 is now available

Patent Grabber 5.7.2 should be downloaded by all Ver. 5.x licensed users. Changes made by the European Patent Office to its Open Patent Services server destroyed Patent Grabber's ability to download any EP, PCT, International or INPADOC documents. This is now fixed.

Those same changes also broke Family-izer. A new version (2.4.2) has now been posted to the web site. Do a force reload of the Family-izer page if you do not see Ver. 2.4.2.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

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.