[paozac]

I used to like Postman, when it was a simple browser extension. I basically used it as a curl gui. Now

> Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.

I guess I’m no longer their target user. Back to curl/httpie.

[lucideer]

I used to like Postman until it locked me out of my locally-stored data while I was offline (testing my own applications on localhost) for an extended period , I found out that it phones home constantly (cannot be disabled) & locks you out if it fails. The developers stating they had no intention of changing this for "security reasons" before closing the Github issue sealed the deal.

[kaszanka]

This sounds unbelievable but it seems to be true? https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/10...

[judge2020]

This is OP's issue: https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/38...

[bathtub365]

I don’t see anything in this issue that I’d characterize as

> The developers stating they had no intention of changing this for "security reasons" before closing the Github issue sealed the deal.

The issue is still open with no response from the developers that mentions security reasons.

[lucideer]

There have been many tickets opened (and closed) on this problem. Searching their issues for the keyword "offline" should bring up some of them. This one is just the latest.

[cloverich]

Its in issue in the sibling comment. The suggested work-around is to not sign in at all.

[lucideer]

For further context: I'm not sure if this has changed but at that time signing in seemed* to be required (there's some discussions in the ticket about confusion in the UI about this so in retrospect UX dark patterns were likely at play). However, while it may have been possible to make ad hoc requests without an account, it didn't seem to be possible to save request collections locally without sign in.

[a85]

That is incorrect. You can save requests inside Collections in the Scratchpad and send requests without an account.

[tluyben2]

It is also buggy, resource hog and instable. I use it on Ubuntu and os x m1 and I often have to kill it because it stops accepting any inputs or it ate all memory (and cpu after that when you click anything). Hoppscotsch and others are better now: I guess they wanted way too much too fast (I did not check but I suppose they got VC money?)?

[quambene]

Can confirm. Unfortunately, Postman is too resource-hungry (on Ubuntu). Launching is taking a while as well.

I have to admit I'm quite surprised that VS Code (which is also an electron app) is relatively fast and resource-sensitive. Having open a few applications in my daily workflow, moderate resource consumption is getting an important selling point for me.

[BiteCode_dev]

Incidently, httpie is getting a GUI: https://github.com/httpie/desktop

[skrebbel]

And VC funding!

[capableweb]

Oh, that's really unfortunate, I really like httpie. I wonder how long time it'll take for them to end up trying to extract as much value from each user as possible...

[jkbr]

HTTPie founder here. These are valid concerns. There are two parts to this: 1/ What happens with HTTPie for Terminal, and 2/ how HTTPie for Web & Desktop and the overall platform will look like.

1/ HTTPie for Terminal will always be open-source and obviously free. The difference is that now we’re able to pay a talented developer to work on the project full-time (the recent 3.0 release is a result of that).

2/ We’re building a new platform with the same principles that made HTTPie for Terminal successful in mind: uncompromising simplicity, focus on productivity, and delightful user experience. We’re in the same space as Postman, but the idea is to be anything like. We’re striving to become what Linear is to Jira, Vercel to AWS, Figma to Adobe, etc. That is, to offer a much simpler and more focused product. Premium services for companies will be a natural extension of the single-player mode, and all incentives will be aligned in a way that doesn’t cannibalize the core experience.

[stavros]

> I wonder how long time it'll take for them to end up trying to extract as much value from each user as possible...

As long as it'll take for the investment documents to be signed.

[revscat]

Source? I really hope this isn't the case. Fucking capitalists kill everything.

[skrebbel]

A lot depends on the founders. There's plenty VC funded, OSS-originated businesses that don't suck. GitLab comes to mind. There's no reason to immediately assume httpie is going to be the Postman story repeated, although I agree that with VC funding it's more likely than without.

[mook]

https://httpie.io/about says they've had a seed round already. Looked it up because that sounds… well it is what it is.

[eatonphil]

I'm building a desktop app that lets you query HTTP APIs but also databases and files. So definitely something you can use as a simple curl GUI. The big benefit of this tool though is that you can script and graph results as well.

Always happy for any feedback!

https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation

[chin7an]

Paw[0] is a pretty good native macOS option, at least for now. They were acquired sometime last year by RapidAPI[1], and since have released electron based versions of their app for Linux and Windows.

I’m really hoping they don’t go the 1Password route and kill their native macOS product to move everyone to the cross-platform one.

[0] https://paw.cloud/ [1] https://rapidapi.com/

[jim180]

No, we are not gonna kill native macOS app![0]

[0] I'm lead developer for macOS app :)

[9dev]

We own licenses for our developers too, and plan on buying more. Please, please, please, don't screw us over and change course later on. We really like Paw, and not being based on Electron is the major selling point :)

[lukevp]

It seems unrealistic long term for any company to maintain one native app and an electron app across other platforms. Spotify did this for a while, but they eventually forced everyone onto the electron app. Something to keep in mind.

[capableweb]

> It seems unrealistic long term for any company to maintain one native app and an electron app across other platforms

Not sure if it's more or less unrealistic to have one native app per platform.

> Spotify did this for a while, but they eventually forced everyone onto the electron app

I don't think (but someone correct me if I'm wrong please) Spotify has ever been a Electron app. If I recall correctly they are indeed embedding Chromium but they are doing their own custom binding (possibly via CEF), not via Electron.

[david38]

Often apps don't have one app per platform, often it's just Mac or something. They get Electron so everyone can use it and then suddenly the Mac app has an equal number of users as Electron (or less) and then at that point justifying development becomes difficult.

[chin7an]

Really hoping the native app survives. Thanks for the great app! I’ve been a user for a long time and hope to remain so.

[robofanatic]

I wonder how much of that was driven by the silicon valley VC culture. You won't get funding if you don't show growth and "innovation", which means catering to all kinds of users resulting into a bloated product with lots of bells and whistles.

[adam_arthur]

The UX has gotten noticeably worse for me. Maybe I'm using it wrong, but now you have to setup a project and name things before you can actually start issuing requests.

And I found the whole experience a bit confusing in terms of user flow

[cyral]

It really needs some love in the UX department. There are so many icons and toolbars it is hard to understand where to find things or why they are placed where they are.

[ljm]

New law: Any novel product with VC funding will inevitably grow a vestigial CMS.

[mattbuilds]

I used to use Postman but now I prefer to just build my own scripts in Python. I use the requests library and can setup things however I want.

[anyfactor]

Same here. I am not sure where would I even use postman for. I essentially would wait 3-5 minutes to have postman initialized, be greeted with a dialogue box for an update or something, drop a json file for the headers and skim through the output.

But it takes seconds to get up and running with requests-html. And it can do anything Postman can do and more. I have no idea how people in organizations use postman though.

[zimpenfish]

> I am not sure where would I even use postman for.

It's really handy for generating test suites to hand to people who don't necessarily have the skills to write Python / node / whatever code. Have worked at places where certain changes needed a Postman collection alongside for people to manually verify that it works.

(Also handy for un-coder people to make test suites, obvs.)

(Also handy as a quick-and-dirty "view this data via the API" when you don't yet have a web UI etc.)

[Raidion]

I've worked in a place where test suites started in postman because of the lack of skill in QA.

For us, the fact that you end up writing "code" in postman meant it had a learning curve anyway, so it was a really short sighted win.

For everyone smart enough to write postman code, especially postman code that leverages the scripts and storing variables, a simple test project set up by a dev is going to be very worthwhile. Postman doesn't have a linter or compiler, and it doesn't enable easy viewing of changes in source control because it's just one big json file.

[sillyquiet]

Same story here. Postman just got too feature-rich for my blood.

curl + bloomRPC + graphiQL covers all my bases nowadays.

[lovedaddy]

The latest updates from httpie have an insomnia type rest client workspace thing.

https://httpie.io/product

[piokoch]

This is some invite only software, am I missing something? I couldn't use it right away, I was asked to join waitlist.

[jkbr]

HTTPie for Web & Desktop is in private beta. We’re shipping updates weekly and inviting people from the waitlist every day. As soon as we’ve tackled the few remaining things on our roadmap and polished some rough edges, it’ll become publicly available.

[sbmthakur]

> I basically used it as a curl gui.

I just use Browser's Network tab for that nowadays. CORS can be a trouble at times, but that can be avoided with a few tweaks.

[dewey]

I think the killer feature for these separate tools is usually that you can easily do a right click -> "copy as curl" in the network inspector, then import it in Postman/Paw and then tweak parameters / add headers there. This is not really possible in the browser network tools.

[panzerklein]

It seems pretty easy with Firefox - there's "Edit and resend" in the context menu of every request.

[dewey]

And then you accidentally refresh or close the tab and everything is gone. I usually use specific requests over many days if I'm reverse engineering something so having these available, sorted in folders for me is important. Of course for other uses cases it might be fine to have them live in the browser.

[ROARosen]

Se above. On MS Edge chromium you can enable to save the requests and even saved environments

[nerdite]

I take that curl command to https://curlconverter.com

And get Python that I can start iterating on. They have lots of languages.

I used to use Postman but the clarity of the code is so much easier to see what’s happening vs postman imo.

[ROARosen]

On the on Microsoft Edge chromium you can can enable an "edit and resend" feature save the requests to "Collections" and create request environments.

[sbmthakur]

I wonder if a such a feature can be added in Chrome/Firefox with an extension.

[ironmagma]

I’ve found Hurl to be quite usable.

https://hurl.dev/

[magicalhippo]

I found SoapUI when I had to develop some SOAP services, but these days it also does REST etc just fine.

For someone like me who just does this occasionally I found it rather useful.

[1]: https://www.soapui.org

[hadrien01]

I just use the HTTP Client from IntelliJ/Rider. It's text only, you can use variables (for Auth for example), and I can copy/paste queries from Fiddler Classic/my browser or to colleagues.

[theFluke]

If you're on macOS, Auxl (https://auxl.io) is another option to try. Support for gRPC should be coming soon. Disclosure: I am the author.

[nileshtrivedi]

Try Insomnia or Hoppskotch.

[oweiler]

How is Insomnia any different? It's basically an OSS carbon copy of Postman.

[piaste]

I switched to Insomnia about a year ago for two main reasons:

- Didn't choke when having ~50 request 'tabs' open

- Didn't try to sell me shit

Granted, Postman had quite a lot more tools in its box for scripting, testing, sharing etc. but I didn't need those.

Insomnia has got a bit fatter since then, but it remains more responsive than Postman was.

[BoorishBears]

You asked how it's different then stated how it's different.

Because it's OSS they didn't feel the need to bog down a perfectly functional product to drive a valuation up.

It's a carbon copy of what Postman started as.

[phgn]

That's what I want. A local-only Postman without too many features or configuration overhead. Insomnia is almost perfect for that.

[wackget]

RESTER on Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rester/

[danuker]

> when it was a simple browser extension

You can download packages of extensions. I would recommend that you do it for the ones you love.

But the browser APIs are constantly changing, forcing you to keep running in order not to fall behind.