Valley News

The VNews App is very well designed. In my little rural town many of my neighbors are lamenting the cessation of home delivery to the green plastic VNews box that is co-located with their Mailbox at the end of their driveway. OK Boomer! It is time to let it go!The days of printing news on dead trees and rushing it to your door every morning are over. One of my sons did that job for about a year and the reality of driving 40-50 miles every morning racing around our rural roads just so you can have a daily “Paper Read’ with your morning coffee is incredibly wasteful. Just get a nice big tablet and enjoy all the advantages of this very well designed App.I know it is hard to adjust from long-standing habits, and I too, at first, missed the cozy familiarity of a physical Newspaper in one hand and my morning coffee in the other. But the best way we can support Local (and non-local) Journalism is to subscribe to the digital version of your favorite morning reads and move on. My 12” iPad Pro has enough “screen real estate” to give me a reading experience that is effective and (after you get adapted to it) enjoyable. I can jump around the sections - I can quickly share and article with a friend - and a bright backlit screen saves me from reaching for that magnifying glass with the built in light that helps my 71 year old eyes see tiny print on a paper page. Yes, I still read “paper based” books, and I don’t want my books and monthly magazines to be digital only …yet. But I don’t want to see our daily news sources, local and global, to disappear because they fall into bankruptcy trying to hand deliver a bunch of paper pages to your door everyday. Please consider supporting your favorite daily news sources, and especially The Valley News, by subscribing to the online editions. I know you will miss the “Paper Reading” experience… and you will have to find another source of paper for starting the wood stove, lining the litter box and packing those old dishes… but if it keeps quality local journalism alive then I say “Go For It!”And don’t look to USPS for a delivery solution. The Post Office is not designed to deliver a daily paper to your door.

A pretty good app that allows for both a newspaper layout and the article text by just one click. One complaint is that the text only layout is not always synced to the newspaper layout. An article in newspaper layout may end on one page and be continued on another; the text only may only pick up the first page so one has to go back to the graphical layout and click again on the next page it is found on. Comic strips do not always follow in sequence when clicked-swiped to see the next strip. They need a more robust layout check by a person to uncover these errors and develop solutions to them.

Good content an many fine features on the app. Would it be possible to get rid or or change settings to turn off whatever is making it “snap to grid” when viewing the whole page? I’d like to be able to move the page right/left/zoom in/zoom out and have the content stay where I put it, instead of jerking around on its own and sometimes hiding the content I am interested in off the screen when I pick up my fingers from the screen. Thanks!