The Mac-Stacks Emporium (www.kagi.com/mac-stacks or www.macos.net/mac-stacks) today announced that it has released Patent Grabber 1.1 in which it is much easier to switch to the Finder while patents are downloading. The quick update (Ver. 1.0 was released only five days ago) is in response to the requests of registered users. They found Patent Grabber 1.0 to be useful for downloading US patents for free, but they wanted the added flexibility of more easily switching to the Finder while the downloading was going on.
What is Patent Grabber?
Patent Grabber is a PowerPC-native application that automates the process of downloading U.S. patents from free public patent archives. Instead of going to an archive and loading and printing patent pages one at a time from your web browser, you simply give Patent Grabber a list of patents and click "Get Patents." Patent Grabber then downloads every page of all the patents to your Mac while you do something else. You can download the patents in either Adobe Acrobat(R) (.pdf) or TIFF format.Whatis New in Version 1.1?
In Patent Grabber 1.0, it was tricky to switch to the Finder while a patent was downloading. Version 1.1 eliminates that problem. Patent Grabber now has a "hotspot" on the Downloading screen that will switch you to the Finder at any point in the patent downloading process. Just point the mouse at the hotspot (no clicking needed), and within a few seconds you are switched to the Finder. Once there, the downloading of patents will proceed in the background while you work in other applications. When the downloading is finished, your Mac will beep and the Application Menu will start blinking.Also added in Version 1.1 is the ability to select a continuous list of patents to print, using Shift-Click.
Patent Grabber is available for US$20. You can find more information at the Mac-Stacks Emporium Web site.