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Nice to see some competition for Postman. Even though Postman works quite well I never really liked it. Lot's of common actions are pretty tedious, like changin

by PascalW 10y ago

Nice to see some competition for Postman. Even though Postman works quite well I never really liked it. Lot's of common actions are pretty tedious, like changing an environment variable and lot's of small annoyances like it automatically following redirects etc. A while ago I took a stab at building my own Postman alternative, Pragma [1]. What I found was that getting the basic functionality going is obviously not that hard, but building a good and useful UI requires quite a bit of effort. https://github.com/pascalw/pragma https://github.com/pascalw/pragma

mittsh 10y ago
I cannot agree more on this :) The first time I saw Insomnia last year, I found it already very well designed. It had a smooth UX on most basic actions and, I have to say, a fun use of the ".rest" domain name! I'm the founder of Paw https://paw.cloud https://paw.cloud and I can safely say that building a good UI is a lot of work. While Paw is built on native Cocoa/AppKit (OS X app framework), the challenges with web are different, but the amount of work is always here. Each custom control, tweak on the text fields and other sorts of custom behaviors are taking a lot of time to imagine, design and implement. But it's a lot of fun too! Clearly Insomnia is one of these apps where by just landing on the website you know that it's made my someone who has a good taste and who pays attention to details. As of the app, most common Mac shortcuts are working. And the fact that you cannot open the Chrome console (Cmd+Shift+I) or select text outside of user inputs are a proof of a well polished product. It's often hard to make a point about polished UIs because it's highly subjective and it's common to see people wanting to compare only "raw features" between two products. I'm not a big fan of Electron apps, and Paw and Insomnia are somehow competing (one native, full-featured with extensions and dynamic values, team syncing…the other being a more lightweight version), but I must admit that Insomnia is nicely made! :)
spoiler 10y ago
> What I found was that getting the basic functionality going is obviously not that hard, but building a good and useful UI requires quite a bit of effort. The hardest part for me is always a "good" UI, I can make it useful, but getting it to look good, smooth and feel pleasant is the biggest challenge.

by PascalW 10y ago

mittsh 10y ago

I cannot agree more on this :) The first time I saw Insomnia last year, I found it already very well designed. It had a smooth UX on most basic actions and, I have to say, a fun use of the ".rest" domain name! I'm the founder of Paw https://paw.cloud https://paw.cloud and I can safely say that building a good UI is a lot of work. While Paw is built on native Cocoa/AppKit (OS X app framework), the challenges with web are different, but the amount of work is always here. Each custom control, tweak on the text fields and other sorts of custom behaviors are taking a lot of time to imagine, design and implement. But it's a lot of fun too! Clearly Insomnia is one of these apps where by just landing on the website you know that it's made my someone who has a good taste and who pays attention to details. As of the app, most common Mac shortcuts are working. And the fact that you cannot open the Chrome console (Cmd+Shift+I) or select text outside of user inputs are a proof of a well polished product. It's often hard to make a point about polished UIs because it's highly subjective and it's common to see people wanting to compare only "raw features" between two products. I'm not a big fan of Electron apps, and Paw and Insomnia are somehow competing (one native, full-featured with extensions and dynamic values, team syncing…the other being a more lightweight version), but I must admit that Insomnia is nicely made! :)

spoiler 10y ago

> What I found was that getting the basic functionality going is obviously not that hard, but building a good and useful UI requires quite a bit of effort. The hardest part for me is always a "good" UI, I can make it useful, but getting it to look good, smooth and feel pleasant is the biggest challenge.