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June 7, 2022November 17, 2022

Power Apps – Express Design (Build an app in seconds) – Figma to app

In continuation with our first series – Power Apps – Express Design (Build an app in seconds) – Image to app, let us see how Figma app works.

Figma is a vector graphics editor and prototyping tool which is primarily web-based, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows. The Figma mobile app for Android and iOS allows viewing and interacting with Figma prototypes on real-time mobile devices.

Figma to App bridges that gap between design and development, with Figma to App designers and developers can collaborate together to build an optimal experience for the end-users.

As a designer, you will simply create your design using Figma and then you upload that Figma file to Power Apps which will be taking care of converting your design into a working app.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the action.

Design in Figma

1. Go to the www.figma.com and create an account, then on the left navigation menu click on Community and look for a template named NETFLIX (first prototype)

2. Click on Duplicate to load in the Designer tool – this is the place for all the customizations

3. Copy the URL from the URL Bar (see red circle in step 2 image).

4. Create a Figma personal access token using the following steps

On the Figma home page, click settings
Look for Personal access tokens, add a token description and create a new one
An important point to note is to copy the token

5. Go to Power Apps and create a Figma (preview) app

And voila, once more – Power Apps has provisioned from Figma in a few minutes

This is a huge productivity (design) saver that will allow businesses to roll out user-friendly, great-looking apps to their users in a short amount of time and effort.

API to app

At the time of writing this blog, the App-from-API feature is to be released in early July 2022.

Coming soon…

June 7, 2022November 17, 2022

Power Apps – Express Design (Build an app in seconds) – Image to app

turn images and designs into apps using AI-powered express design

The need for Digitization is constantly growing and there are never enough resources (Cost-Scope-Schedule) to fulfil all the requirements, therefore Microsoft on 25th May during the recent Microsoft Build event, has introduced the “Express Design – Build an app in seconds” which is a new Power Apps features that accelerate the process for getting started by taking existing content (e.g.: a picture of your paper form, a screenshot of a design, a PPT, a PDF or a Figma design file) and converting them in working Power App with UI and data without requiring the maker to learn how to build an app.

This magic is done using Azure Cognitive Vision OCR model to recognize the text from your image as well as the Azure Computer Vision Object Detection model to recognize the controls on the image whether it’s a text input, a label or radio button, etc.

Azure Cognitive Vision OCR & Azure Computer Vision Object Detection model

After that, even though it’s optional, however, it’s recommended for you to set up the data through dataverse, so you will have your data stored in dataverse.

We have got three different options and we are going to see each one of them

Image to app
Figma to app
API to app

Image to app

Let’s get started by building an Image to app

1. On Power Apps, click Create and select Image (preview)

2. The Upload an image screen appears, where either you upload an image of your own or start with some sample images – in our case, let us upload the following Car Details Application Wireframe

3. After Azure identifies the component, tag and assign each component as per the requirements

4. Next the system allows you to create a new table in Dataverse (recommended), or simply skip it for now.

5. In this step, map the column as per the required data type, review then create.

And voila, in a few minutes – Power Apps has provisioned the app as per the given input!!!

This is a whole new world of possibilities for the citizen developers, those architects or building technicians who are looking for a genuine alternative to building an app – truly it is Empowering every person and every business on the planet to achieve more.

Now, we are going to see how Figma to app works.

February 13, 2021November 17, 2022

The road ahead

Recently I came across Bill Gates’s first book – The Road Ahead – which he published twenty-five years ago, I was interested to read about the predictions which he made in this book such as:

The internet transformation – travelling back in time people were still navigating with paper maps, listened to music on CDs, watched movies on VHS tapes – today the adoption of digital technology to transform services or businesses has engaged billions of people – anytime, anywhere – with smarter experiences.

Digital agents or Virtual assistants – Alexa, Cortana, and Siri have already given birth, however, the visionary has envisioned a more powerful technology capable of learning human requirements and preferences in much the way that a human assistant does – grab this opportunity, it’s the equivalent of the goose that lays the golden egg.

It is great to see how technology is helping us in unprecedented progress on COVID-19 – for instance of the innovation on rapid tests, a British company LumiraDx has created a device that’s roughly the size of a thick cell phone, with a card reader at one end. A health care worker takes a sample from a patient, inserts it into the machine, and gets results within 15 minutes.

According to Schumpeter, the process of technological change in a free market consists of three parts: invention (conceiving a new idea or process), innovation (arranging the economic requirements for implementing an invention), and diffusion (whereby people observing the new discovery adopt or imitate it) – in layman’s terms, this means Schumpeter argued that anyone seeking profits must innovate.

Knowledge must be used because it multiplies by spending!