The Plain Dealer 4+

The new version is a major improvement over the old. It seems the slow refresh, blurry images and text of the past has finally been solved. The navigation seems to work well also once you understand the new interface. One problem that occurs however is the startup in landscape mode. Even though I set the preference to view one page wide, when I pick the paper to read, it initially displays one page but it is very small with lots of space on the sides. A workaround for this is to turn the device momentarily to portrait mode and then back to landscape after which the page displays full width. This should be an easily solvable problem.

To start, I read it on an iPad that doesn’t have a huge capacity, not tiny, but certainly not huge. The app lets you open an edition, so far, so good. It retains the edition in memory and there isn’t a readily obvious way to delete old editions without removing and reinstalling the app. I don’t use the iPad for a lot of other things, only one family member that plays solitaire. About once every 6 weeks I have to do the remove/reinstall procedure or the memory will be filled.

If they fixed this issue I’d rate it higher. The only remaining thing that would keep me from rating it a 5 would be the inability to copy items such as the crossword puzzle. We have a 7-day subscription, always have. When 7-day delivery stopped I could copy and print the crossword—my wife likes to do a hard copy with a pen—then with the update about a year ago that ability was removed. I assume that it is a copyright issue, but we are just trying to use it the way it was intended, not copying to distribute. They need to either deliver the paper every day or return the ability to print the crossword without fussing with the cumbersome screenshots method.

This new Plain Dealer is so bad I don't know where to start. Sometimes it works and sometimes it's extremely slow loading and eventually I get frustrated and turn it off. Sometimes the photos are too blurry to read and I turn it off. Sometimes only partial text appears and I turn it off. Maybe I should just never turn it on. Way to go Plan Dealer

Just when I was going to give the Plain Dealer some credit in a review this happens. The paragraph above the one I’m typing now is not my writing, it popped up when I said I wanted to give a review. I have to admit that I agree with what the author of that paragraph says. However, let’s get back to what I originally intended to say. The most annoying problem for me was the random spacing on words that would appear in an article. That problem appears to be corrected and I wanted to compliment you for that. However, now at times a single letter is omitted, usually at the beginning or end of a word. For example when reading an article on the National Football League the article would read FL instead of NFL.