The Mercury News

Overall the user experience of the new app, particularly the launch of the app, is more polished than the old app, but it is missing a few options that the previous version had.========= I view the app on an ipad mini. The old app allowed me to expand the content so that the text was bigger and it was much easier to read while being able to quickly go from page to page. While in this zoomed-in state, with the older version, I could scroll down or advance to the next page. I cannot do this on the new app, and the text appears very small now. If I zoom in on the page I have to zoom out so that I can go to the next page. The is very awkward (having to zoom in, and then out on every page), so I just live with the tiny font. This is significant and is the main reason I rated the app so low. =========== Navigating to other section of the paper is harder to do.

Giving credit where credit is due, the vastly revised new version released today is a beautiful product. Appearance on my iPad is orders of magnitude better than the old version, and I can get what I need very quickly. Sure, they have made cuts, but this is a still a great paper. To the complaints about the Merc printing articles from the Washington Post and New York Times, I note the same issue, only as a complement. These papers have some of the best reporters, syndicated into papers everywhere. Nothing wrong with that. Thank you San Jose Mercury for this wonderful update. I would ignore reviews based on earlier versions, they are no longer relevant after today’s major update. My favorite columnist is Sal Pizarro. One thing I wish they would do is add automation to the crossword puzzles.

I greatly enjoy the flexibility the app gives for reading the Mercury News any time and anywhere, but would like to bring to your attention one technical problem I consistently have while using the app: The app works perfectly for, typically, several days, and after that it stops loading the text. The article titles and some graphic still loads, but instead of the articles’ text there remain blank areas. Sometimes it even looks like the text initially loaded for a moment, but it is immediately overwritten by those blank areas. Once that happens, the only remedy I found is to delete the app and load it again - and the problem disappears for the next few days, until it happens again (and I have to delete the app and reload it again…). If not for that problem, I would give 5 stars rating and not the 4 stars I gave. Thank you, Witold