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Introducing the Airtable Connected Apps Platform™

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Kelly_OShaughne
Airtable Employee
Airtable Employee

:wave: Hi all! I’m Kelly - a product manager at Airtable focused on helping users build powerful, secure apps for their org. I’m excited to introduce some powerful new features (including my personal favorite, granular permissions), as well as a new way to think about what you’re building in Airtable.

Today most teams have the autonomy to choose the software and tools that work best for them. While this allows teams to move fast, it can also create massive data silos, misalignment, and disjointed collaboration. There’s critical data spread across dozens of applications, and no team has access to all of it, which can cause work to slow way down

We believe it’s time to reject the trade-off between moving fast and moving together. That’s why we’re introducing the Airtable Connected Apps Platform™.

The Airtable Connected Apps Platform™ lets every team create powerful applications to be shared across the organization, built on shared company data, and on the same connected platform.

Building apps in Airtable isn’t new. To help teams create even better apps, we’re releasing new features to make them more powerful, more secure, and more connected.

Updates available today:
We’re rolling these updates out over the course of the day; if you don’t see them reflected in your workspace, hold tight! You should see them updated by the end of the day.

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Interface Designer is now officially out of beta for all Airtable users. You can transform data into intuitive and interactive app interfaces that can be quickly customized for each team member. These foundational updates and improvements make it easier for your team to interact with your app. New updates to Interface Designer include:

  • A redesigned editor in the sidebar provides a central place to make changes to your interface—all in real-time and keeping your canvas clutter-free. Whether you’re using a calendar to track deadlines or a visual gallery to look through creative assets, you can easily manage what you show and how it appears from a single location With the new editor, it only takes a click to change how your data is visualized.

  • A new top navigation bar within your interface allows your users to easily navigate between relevant pages in a cinch

  • And, our new full page record detail experience gives you the ability to fully customize what others can see and edit when they click into the details of a record. So if you want your team to update project status without seeing every project detail you’re tracking, you can customize exactly which fields they can view and edit.

Frame

Introducing granular permissions. Now, Pro and Enterprise users can decide how others interact with your app. Gone are the days of setting up a new personal view, shared view, or base to customize data for every new collaborator, department lead, or team. Now, you can simply drag and drop the data you want to share into an Interface, add rules and a dynamic current-user filter to personalize content for each collaborator, and share the Interface to the intended audience(s).

So, whether you want to share the entire app, only certain pieces via an interface, or choose exactly what data is shown to each user —your app is as dynamic and secure as you choose it to be. New updates to permissions include:

  • The ability to share an interface without sharing the underlying base through Interface-only editor, commenter, and read-only permission levels. You can share interfaces via email or invite link, and choose to share silently when you don’t want an email notification firing off to a large group.
  • Current-user filter improvements to personalize interface content. Add an element filter specified to “Viewer’s records only” to ensure each user only sees records tagged to them so they get all the information they need, and none that they don’t. You can also let end users adjust the filter themselves based on their needs by adding a Filter element and match a collaborator or email field to the current user. If you’re on Airtable Enterprise, you can also add a group user filter, and end users will be able to see tasks associated with their group.
  • Admin panel support for Enterprise admins to manage interfaces. Admins will be able to see who’s creating or using interfaces as well as who has access to each interface.

Coming soon:

  • Redesigned home screen: Discover and access the apps your organization relies on, right from the new home screen. Enterprise customers can opt into the new home screen today. We’ll be rolling out the new home screen to all users over the next few months.
  • Interface insights: Coming in the next few weeks, Enterprise users will now be able to see exactly how interfaces are being used
  • Verified data: Publish and mark key data so everyone can build apps with the same, accurate information. Verified data is currently in development and will be available in early 2023.
  • Data map: Visualize your data and how everything connects, so you can build, manage, and scale work. Data map is currently in development and will be available in early 2023.
  • Two-way sync: Automatically update data across multiple apps to ensure information is always current. Two way sync is currently in limited availability for Enterprise customers. It will be available more broadly in early 2023.
  • Apps by Airtable: Get started faster with apps that can be used straight out of the box—each is hand-built for an essential use case—and based on industry best practices. The first set of these apps will be available in early 2023.

Learn more about these updates and what a connected apps platform can do for you and your team in our blog post!

Additional resources:

We can’t wait to hear what you think, and see what you build, with these updates!

We would also love to have you join us for a Community AMA on October 27 at 9 am PT where we will talk about all the updates to Interface Designer. I’ll be sharing some of our thinking behind these features, and will also be available to answer all your burning questions! You can register here and we hope to see you there!

70 Comments
Russell_Findlay
8 - Airtable Astronomer
8 - Airtable Astronomer

Really exciting changes and even more so the vision for what Airtable can become… congrats to the whole team pulling this together.

For me the two way sync not only within airtable but from other software e.g. SalesForce to create verified data could place Airtable at the heart of our org… developing automations is so much easier than in SF but with record count constraints there will always be the need to feed from other internal and external sources

kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Thanks! I like the idea of the details page being a modal.

Emily, when playing with the details page, it appears that each table can have only one details page design. It would be nice if I could have a new details page design for each linked record field. I know that would be a lot of different engineering involved but it would be really nice.

Use case 1:
I have three linked tables (clients, projects, and tasks) and two interface pages: clients and tasks. Both interface pages show the linked projects. However, when looking at the projects from a clients page, I would like to see a different details design versus when looking at the projects from a tasks page. When coming from the clients page, the project details should show info about tasks but not the client. When coming from the tasks page, the project details should show info about clients but not tasks.

Use case 2:
I have two tables (projects and people), with multiple linked records between the two tables: project lead, team members, other interested people. When looking at the details for the project lead, I want to see lots of details, but for other interested people, I only want to see their contact info.

Emily_Sermons
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Hi @kuovonne! Thanks for all of the kind words on the launch so far :slightly_smiling_face:

That exact usecase is another one of our fast follows! You’ll be able to create multiple detail pages that can be triggered from different entry points. See the design that our engineers are working on right now. Keep an eye out this winter for this update!

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Londya_E
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Oh that’s wonderful! Thanks for following up on this!

Kelly_OShaughne
Airtable Employee
Airtable Employee

Thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback @Karlstens. All of these suggestions make a lot of sense and are on our radar, but it’s always incredibly helpful to get more context on why these changes would be useful to customers like yourself. I’ve shared this with the team as consideration for future product iterations!

Londya_E
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

This would also be great functionality to add to the interface buttons menu, for when you want to open a record url with an interface button. Thanks!

kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Thank you so much for monitoring this thread and replying to people. It is a wonderful improvement in Airtable’s community engagement style. It can be hard balancing time between working on the engineering side of a product versus communicating about the product; thanks for walking that line. (And also a thank you to @Jordan_Scott1 for supporting this increased involvement by Airtable’s product managers on these forums.)

Thank you also for let us know about all these fast follows! It is so nice to get these peaks into Airtable’s roadmap and not have people hanging wondering if their asks have even been heard.

Here’s another suggestion relating to the community forum. What do you think of updating the “About me” portion of your community profile to indicate your role in Airtable? Your profile has the Airtable badge so it is clear that you work for Airtable, but there are a variety of Airtable staff members who have posted on these forums and it isn’t always clear who is a product manager versus support staff versus something else.

Steve_Singleton
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Congrats on rolling out these great new features! Not sure if this is the best place or not for a bug report but I am having an issue: in addition to my main Airtable account (Pro) I set up a separate free test account to test what an unpaid user might see if I invite a read-only viewer of my Interface. In Interface pages I’ve set up, I am having problems displaying grid layout elements. When I’m logged in to the main account, everything displays fine, as it does when I “view as” the test account (while still logged in to the main account). But if I share with and log in as the test account user I can see all the elements in the Interface page except that any grid elements just display as gray boxes.

UPDATE: I now see that if I click “Allow access to data in the base” when sharing this seems to fix the issue. Is this the intended design? I would have expected that checkbox to work something like the way sharing views does (limit/allow access to a view or the whole base). If someone has designed an interface with a grid and intends to share it outside an internal team, when would you NOT need/want to check this box? Is there a place in your release notes where you explain what is and isn’t exposed by checking this box?

Hannah_Martin
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

This looks very promising! I was wondering when Interfaces would be out of beta just the other day, so I’m glad to know the team has been hard at work on them.

Played around a bit yesterday (for me) and I noticed that adding Fields to an Interface page has some odd behaviour. For some reason, they seem to automatically want to jump to the top of the page (the header) no matter where you actually drag them to. Then, when you do place them, the interface jumps upwards several sections. It’s also quite tricky even just moving them around. Is anyone else experiencing this issue, or is it just me?

Also, I second having more colour options. I’d also like to place actual borders around text fields rather than just having them grouped by one dull background colour. I think that way it could break them up more and be easier for people to read.

I’m not trying to be negative here! I know it must be a lot of work getting this sort of thing out, and I am really enjoying it so far other than those two caveats. Hopefully one day we can share the interfaces as a view-only way of publishing data, but I’m aware it’s still early days. Good luck to the team with continuing to update and refine everything!

raghavsethi
Airtable Employee
Airtable Employee

This sounds like a bug, could you please report it to support@airtable.com?