The Mercury News 12+

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.

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.

In contrast to the slick verticals scroll news sites this is just like the physical paper. I read on an iPad mini and zoom the article, touch the colored “go-to” to continue to another page. Touch again to return to the page I came from. To correct a previous reviewer, you can download for offline reading, which I use on the airplane. There is an options setting. 30 days of back newspapers are available. Yes, downloading issues will take up room. Previous reviewer who was critical of APPs data use might have a 16g tablet/phone. I have no problems on a 64gb device with MANY apps and a very active email inbox.