NOF13 is an update, not an upgrade
I've just upgraded to NOF13. Here is my report:
The only main UI change is that it has a Windows 8-type home page.
Incredibly, it still doesn't properly support Windows 7 Libraries folder - I click on the libraries folder to open a file and I get only the top level folders. I have sub-folders within my libraries folders but I have to navigate through the top-level folder to find them again.
Some necessary and fundamental changes have STILL NOT BEEN ADDRESSED. The data objects are EXACTLY THE SAME as before (in fact, I don't think they've changed since around NOF 7). The data objects interface is still the same old clunky Windows XP ODBC interface, and there is no way to modify an existing Data List or External Data Object. The only workaround - as before - is to create a completely new data object and copy & paste the design pages from the old stacked page to the newly-generated stacked pages and then remove the previous objects and pages. And because it still relies on the old Windows ODBC utility, there is still no support for Access 2010 or Excel data sources (let alone Office 2013 or beyond)!
There is also no change in how the "header" page of a data list is produced either. It's still not possible to design it. I've never been able to use it, so I've always had to produce my own separate HTML document manually.
HTML5. This is a big improvement as all my sites now are in HTML5. However, many of my pages use layered content, therefore I can't choose HTML5 as an option! I still have to use HTML4.01 CSS (without tables) - or at least choose this for the layout containing the overlapping objects (which is usually the entire page anyway).
Overlapping objects is perhaps the main reason why I continue to use NOF. I have a background image over which I place a table of database-generated content; and I have mouse actions that switch in different videos in an in-line frame. And there's a still image in place until the videos play. I don't think there is any other way to implement this kind of feature. NOF WYSIWIG drag-and-drop design is clean and accurate. Nevertheless, what is still missing is a way to manually specify XYZ coordinates for super-precise control of (overlapping) objects.
NOF hasn't improved all that much yet overall. In fact, I only use NOF for data-generated sites (despite the serious limitations due to the poor ODBC interfacing). All my sites now are produced using Joomla, which has improved dramatically over the last year or so - and I can integrate very easily with MySQL databases and other real-time data sources. There is also a wealth of templates to choose from, far more flexible that NOF's templates, which tend to be always very blocky in design. I use NOF to produce the equivalent of static HTML ebooks, which I then integrate into my Joomla website as an external page, so NOF templates have become superfluous.
NOF 12 was extraordinarily slow, it took sometimes as much as 10 seconds to open up a page, and about the same time to move from cell to cell in a table to edit its contents (and I have a reasonably fast computer with 8MB RAM and Windows 7). Now it takes about 8 seconds to open a page from the site page and about 3 seconds to move from page to page with the site navigation feature. That's a slight improvement. And there does seem to be a significant speed improvement when editing tables - about one second to open a cell for editing.
I'm not sure if there's been any improvement in the layout of tables. In NOF12, it was almost impossible to specify column widths or row heights, particularly if there are merged cells involved. Usually the only way is to edit the HTML tags manually after the page has been generated. Nevertheless, I think the accuracy (or stability) of cell/row sizing and placement has improved slightly.
There's no documentation available for NOF 13, so I suppose it's the same documentation as NOF 12.
This 2013 version is really a NOF12 update not a major upgrade. I'd be happy to pay for significant improvements to help support the development and future of NOF; but only around $20 or so, not $64. It's a bit sneaky to charge so much for what should have been a free update. This is update is a necessary "fix" for the sluggish NOF12 version, and should really have been part of the initial purchase contract.
However, if there were a good likelihood of some REAL practical improvements to the product (particularly a new or better way of handling external data, and accurate tweaking of tables using pixel values or specific HTML tags) then I'll pay gladly! Don't cheat your customers: it just creates resentment; but give us value for money and your product will grow in popularity. Your major competitors in today's world of web publishing are Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress, and their basic underlying products are FREE. One only pays for specialist add-ons, and usually not much. It's a far more flexible way to produce websites. If you pursue your current policy then you're simply pushing new and existing customers away. The potential strength of NOF is as mentioned above: accurate page design for specific pages (difficult to do in Joomla, say) and perhaps - if you can make it work as it should - live or static data-driven content. Ideally, NOF should have a feature to seamlessly integrate pages into a Joomla/Drupal/Wordpress site. In fact, NOF would sell better as an add-on to these CMS products than a website-in-a-box package.
I suspect there has been some important improvements "under the hood" - some of the previous delays may have been due to the use of external .Net or C++ libraries I don't know. But NOF still needs a fairly major overhaul - a tighter way of managing external data, global support for HTML5 and overlapping objects, integral Ajax design and auto-generation / management of multiple page sizes for the different mobile/tablet devices.
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