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

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.

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.