Is your team still taking turns building in the Canvas designer? Have you been patiently waiting for coauthoring to be generally available to finally start building canvas apps with your teammates? Power Apps is beyond thrilled to officially announce the much-anticipated general availability of Canvas coauthoring! Now, both the Canvas designer and Modern app designer have coauthoring as a generally available feature. Fusion teams can now work in the same app at the same time, see changes made by other team members while making your own. Building sophisticated apps require teamwork from others’ expertise; with coauthoring being generally available, building Power Apps with your team has never been easier!

Enable coauthoring in Canvas

As we roll out coauthoring general availability in the Canvas designer, navigate to the Canvas designer for the desired app that you’d like to coauthor in. Then, open App settings, under New >, enable the Coauthoring toggle.

Why coauthor?

Coauthoring revolutionizes the way makers collaborate in Power Apps. It allows multiple users to simultaneously work on the same app, enabling real-time updates and seamless communication via commenting. Team members can now share ideas, provide instant feedback, and make changes without dividing efforts or consolidate changes from multiple app instances. This not only accelerates the development process, but also enhances creativity and innovation by allowing diverse perspectives to come together in the app authoring journey. The Power Apps team is excited to support this feature as GA to further empower fusion teams to build more efficiently. Visit our documentation to learn more details about this experience.  

Upcoming coauthoring plans

This feature is not yet on by default, as this wave of coauthoring general availability includes some limitations, documented here. We continue to build to reach better feature parity for single-author sessions before enabling the feature to be on by default. If you have any feedback, please share with us to continue to improve the overall coauthoring experience.

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In summary, the app navigation is now the default panel in the designer, allowing makers to edit the sitemap efficiently. The Pages panel now has a restructured hierarchy to better align with makers’ mental model and accurately reflect any coauthoring personas. Component designers now open within the app designer (unless otherwise specified), along with improved discoverability to entry points.  

A newly improved maker navigation

We received feedback regarding the discoverability of editing the app sitemap navigation, and we heard you! The new default panel, Pages, is now a combination of the previous Pages and Navigation panels. The new Pages panel now contains two sections, Navigation and All other pages. The Navigation section shows the app navigation (also known as sitemap). The All other pages section now contains pages that are in the app, but not part of the app navigation. Makers can now move pages to and from Navigation within a couple clicks, without having to deliberately remove and readd.

The hierarchy of forms and views in the new Pages panel has also been restructured to correctly reflect mental models as well as correctly reflecting any coauthoring personas. Forms are now nested under views, creating a hierarchy as shown below.

Component designers now open within the Modern App Designer

Editing components in the Modern App Designer is now easier than ever! To edit a default view or form, hover over the selected item and select the edit pencil icon to launch the component designer. All component designers now open within the Modern App Designer, where makers can navigate back and forth using the Back button. The right panel now contains all associated views, forms, charts, and settings. Makers can not only now easily see the associated views, forms, and charts with the table, but also edit them (within, or in a new tab) in a much easier fashion.

Learn more

To learn more about the Modern App designer, refer to further documentation: Overview of the model-driven app designer – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn.

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Gone are the days of switching between the app designer and backstage to set and manage variables and collections. In the new experience, app makers can now define and interact with them in real-time while designing the app. This creates an intuitive and seamless app-building process where makers can focus on building apps efficiently without unnecessary back and forth clicks.

View variables in app

While both variables and collections are defined the same way – using Power Fx, the new Variables panel is now available as part of the left rail in the app designer. Within the new Variables panel, it contains global variables, context variables, component variables, and collections. When each section is expanded, you can interact with each variable to view its definition, direct and indirect uses. By clicking on the results, the item in the app is then selected and shown on the relevant page with the formula bar highlighted.

View collections in app

Collections are located in the same panel, right underneath Variables. By clicking on ‘View Table’ in the ellipses, a modal appears showing the details of all the variables and collections established in the app. In the same modal, you can also view all the other variables in details, such as images or tables.

Learn More

For more information on setting variables or creating collections in canvas, please refer to further documentation below:

• Setting a variable
• Creating a collection

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The preview of the modern app designer was announced around June of 2021. Since then, we’ve added many new features, as well as improved the current experience based on feedback received from the community. We’ve made lots of improvements and will continue to do so after general availability to make the designer the best that it can be. New features added in the modern app designer include the ability to add custom pages, business process flows, Power BI dashboards, interactive dashboards, new areas, URLs/web resources as a subarea, customize sitemap icons, locales, app tile icon, and manage chart views.

The modern app designer is the foundation for many more exciting features in the app authoring space. Therefore, we want your feedback! Let us know your thoughts and suggestions in the community, and please visit our documentation for more information.

Happy building!

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Geospatial features empower app makers to introduce location-based capabilities into their apps to visualize and update geospatial data using tools they are already familiar with. Geospatial components, powered by Azure Maps services, can now be added with the ease of drag-and-drop and with low code development.

Address Input

Entering addresses is a common business scenario used for form input or address search. Although common, this process can be frustrating and error-prone, especially in mobile scenarios. With the address input control, entering addresses is now easier than ever. The address input component dynamically suggests multiple potential address matches as you type and automatically completes the address when an option is selected – which creates a quicker and easier address-entering experience.

The address input control also returns the address as structured data, allowing your application to extract information like city, street, municipality, and even latitude and longitude, in a format friendly to many locales and international address formats. The address input control is now generally available to use in Power Apps. 

How does the Address Input control work?

1. Go to Power Apps and create a new app

• Prerequisite: Make sure the environment has been enabled for geospatial features.
• Navigate to Power Apps.  Select “Create” on the left panel, and select “A Canvas app from blank”.

2. Insert the Address Input control in the app

• Under the “Insert” tab > “Input” dropdown, select “Address Input”.

3. The Address Input control is now ready to use!

• Optional: In the property panel, you can customize the number of search results and search radius based on the latitude and longitude entered.
• To tailor search results towards the user’s current location, add “Location.Latitude” and “Location.Longitude” in the Latitude and Longitude properties respectively. The control will then prioritize search results that are closest to the user’s current location.

Interactive Map

A dynamic mapping experience plays an important role in having an effective visualization and interpretation of location data. With the interactive map component, makers can now visualize location data in Power Apps in just a few clicks! 

To add pins on the map, app makers can bind a dataset of addresses or latitude/longitude pairs to plot each location. The icons and colors of the pins can also be customized dynamically based on user’s data, providing another layer of differentiation among the pins. App makers can also add informational cards to pins, allowing users to see additional information about each particular pin. The map component also provides basic capabilities such as zoom in or out, cluster pins, apply current location, tilt map views, road views, and satellite views. The map component is now generally available to use in Power Apps.

How does the Interactive Map work?

1. Go to Power Apps and create a new app

• Prerequisite: Make sure the environment has been enabled for geospatial features.
• Navigate to Power Apps and select “Create” on the left panel, and select a “A Canvas app from blank”.

2. Insert the map component in the app

• Under the “Insert” tab > “Media” dropdown, select “Map”.

3. The map is now ready to use!

The map component allows makers to add pins on the map, customize pins, use in conjunction with the address input, and other basic mapping capabilities.

We want to hear from you!

As always, we would love to hear from you on how we could keep improving our geospatial features. Please leave your feedback and comments on this post or the Ideas Forum, so we can keep track of your comments and requests.

You can also learn more about address input and the map component here. 

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