OpenManual

About OpenManual

1.7 is about finding the manual, and honestly it's because I caught the app missing ones I could find myself. I typed a camera's name into a search engine and had the page with its manual immediately, and my own app was showing me two catalogs and a copy in French. The whole point of this app is to find the manual on sites that don't need a login, without me doing the searching. So I went through why it didn't, and it was a handful of things that apply to any device, not just that one. FINDING THE MANUAL • A device has more than one name and the app was only searching one of them. If it had a catalog number that's all it asked for, and a manual is titled by the name. Now it searches under every name the device has, and the one people actually call it goes first. • Scanning a medical device's barcode pulls up its FDA record, and that record doesn't write things the way a manual does. The company is filed under its legal name, with LP or Incorporated on the end, so a pulse oximeter's own manual got downloaded five times and turned away every time for not naming the company that way. An ultrasound got searched by its two part numbers and never by its name. Both are fixed, and so are a few more like them. • When the manual is on a page the app can't pull a file from, it lists the page now, under Where the manual is. It used to just drop those. You tap one and it opens in Safari, and there's a Search the web yourself row after every search too. • A recall notice, an FDA clearance letter, a brochure and a sell sheet all name your device just like its manual does, and the search used to stop as soon as it had one. Now it keeps going until it has an actual manual, a card that isn't one says so, and the screen tells you when no manual was downloaded. • A manual that's only in another language doesn't end the search anymore, and its card says which languages it's in. • A manual for a different device that only mentions yours gets turned away. A camera's guide that explains how to plug it into a hub was being offered as the hub's manual. • It reads what a document is off its cover. A defibrillator's operating instructions were filed as an accessory guide and shown as not being a manual. • Once you have the manual, the search stops waiting on a slow copy from somewhere else. A coffee machine's manual was on screen in 1 second and the search kept going for 2 more minutes behind one download that never showed up. Now it gives it 15 seconds. • It asks three search engines now. It used to try seven addresses, and the other four never gave it a usable result in any check I have on record, so it made sense to remove them. • A car you scan by its VIN is searched by its year and model, because that's how an owner's manual is titled. ASKING A QUESTION • Ask answers from any manual you kept now, and that includes a PDF you added yourself. On a medical device it used to answer only if the FDA's registry confirmed the device and the manual came from one of 18 manufacturers' own sites or a regulator. I measured that on 16 older hospital devices and 1 of them qualified, which is the opposite of what this app is for. • So now the answer tells you where that copy came from, and it says when the device isn't confirmed with the FDA's registry so you check the model on the cover. • What didn't change is that it only quotes the manual with the page shown, every quote is checked against that page, and it still won't answer a question about a specific person or a clinical decision. THE LOOK • The app wasn't well laid out and I only just realized it. So there are four tabs now, Scan, Devices, Answers and Settings, and the first screen has the three ways in at the top: scan it, use a photo, or type it in. • It uses your iPhone's own colors now, with six accents to pick from in Settings. Everything you keep still stays on your phone, and in your backups. And the shared list of manuals others kept is gone.

App privacy

The developer, Gunnar Hostetler, reported these privacy practices to Apple.