I read an article recently describing this concept at CoderHump. Ben Garney used it to make it easier for game artists and designers to tweak game settings without training them on an API or building and maintaining a separate tweak input tool for them to use.

This concept takes advantage of a useful feature of Google Docs spreadsheets: they can be set up to publish in ATOM format, which is XML. You can lay out columns and rows so that they correspond to variables and values like a flat-file database. There are docs on the API.

Like any Google Doc, you can set up access control if you want. If you want multiple editors, think carefully about how you deal with unexpected values. It would be nice if there was cell-level protection.

Step-By-Step

Google Docs:

Create a spreadsheet. Put in a couple columns and rows worth of data, such as the days of the week in column one and their corresponding name in Spanish in column two. (This could be an awesome translation tool, no?).

The settings you need are in the Share Tab on the Right:

Using Sharing settings… , publish the spreadsheet so that it is publicly viewable:

Then open the pubish as a Web Page settings from the same settings tab:

Change the dropdown menu from Web page to ATOM…

… and copy the ATOM URL to use in ActionScript.

Flash: Load the XML using the URL for the ATOM feed as the URLRequest string.

Protonotes

I was looking forward to an opportunity to use ConceptShare recently, when I found that they have changed their model to pay-for-play. It wasn’t budgeted for the small project I was working on and is not a service we use enough to justify keeping turned on.

So I Googled “ConceptShare” and found several alternatives. The one I chose to use is called Protonotes. What I like about it (besides the freeness) is that it works by attaching itself to your prototype. This is quite the opposite of ConceptShare’s approach, which showed everyone a picture of the prototype inside it’s interface.

This difference didn’t seem like a big deal at first. But once I circulated it among the other people on the project I began to appreciate that it is significant. ConceptShare is all about sharing non-web visuals synchronously. Protonotes is all about sharing web-based content asynchronously. The kind of work I do involves getting input over a period of days to weeks – ConceptShare was the wrong tool for that job anyway.

Another plus for Protonotes is it’s simplicity:

1. You set up an account
2. they send you an email with directions
3. You paste in a small Javascript snippet in the header of each HTML you wish it to appear in.

You can tweak the settings if you want. When you load the pages you will see a retractable ribbon at the top which allows you to add and edit sticky notes right on the page. You see your comments and those of other reviewers. You can use Protonote’s database or your own to store the comments. There is an index view that simplifies tracking down comments without having to troll through each page, and a couple of status indicators. That’s it.

Be careful to keep the file name and location constant – this appears to be part of how Protonotes tracks what comments it displays.

Let’s hope this one stays free!