In the last couple of months on either my home machine or work machine (and one friends laptop) I have been unable to search the visual patents on the US Patent and Trademark Office website. Seems no matter what machine I try it requires that I install apple quicktime player...Which all machines I have tried this on already have (the most up to date version of).

Is it them, are they out of date? Any one else had this issue?

Why not use google patents? In most instances it is easier, although sometimes their character recognition software could use a little tweaking.

Mike

Because the patent office is giving you TIF files, and quicktime told windows it does TIF, but it doesn't do *that* kinf of tif...sigh

install the one referenced on the PTO web site, it works fine.....
(I think it's called alternatif , or something like that, been a while)

As a previous poster noted, the issue is software compatibility.

I use versions  of  alternatiff ( http://www.alternatiff.com/ ) with both Internet Explorer & Firefox browsers  & Windows XP , Windows VISTA   (no 7 or 8 for me yet)  to view USPTO image files.  Google's CHROME browser does not work for me in that particular venue.

I then copy those tiff images  into a very very old streamlined version of Adobe image editing software to generate the edited versions I  save as jpg &  insert into DATAMP entries for tool patents.