14 ms·

Going native

287 points by Garbage 10y ago

macsj200 10y ago
"The native apps cover all the features and functionality of the Chrome app and Chrome extension together, and more. The native apps run on Electron overcoming a lot of the restrictions of the Chrome platform." My understanding was that Electron is just an embedded instance of Chromium, so I'm reading this sentence more like "The native apps run on [embedded Chromium] overcoming a lot of the restrictions of the [standalone Chromium] platform."
- abrowne 10y ago
  Yeah, kind of a stretch to call it "native".
- EduardoBautista 10y ago
  Yup. Luckily, there is Paw[0] if you want a native experience on the mac. [0]: https://paw.cloud https://paw.cloud
  - xenadu02 10y ago
    I had the pleasure of emailing the creator of Paw when he was looking at applying to YC. It's a great app and I recommend it.
  - eyko 10y ago
    I liked paw, but postman is free. I'd consider paw at half the price because I don't spend that much time testing REST APIs, but when I do I don't mind using a better tool than httpie or curl. Postman does the job (quite well) for free.
    - a85 10y ago
      We do have a subscription service now called Postman Pro - does API documentation (api.getpostman.com), API Monitoring, Mock servers, Team collaboration and it has a powerful API (api.getpostman.com). More coming soon! Postman - the app will always remain free. :) (Founder here)
    - gschier 10y ago
      There's another free REST client called Insomnia (https://insomnia.rest https://insomnia.rest), which I've been working on for the past two years, but I don't think there are any other popular "native" options. For some reason, all of the REST clients seem to be Chrome apps. It will be unfortunate when Google sunsets Chrome apps next year :(
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    Paw looks like a really nice, slick, professional tool. I've been using Postman for years and really like it, and am used to it. I've yet to see a 'use case' where Paw can do something that Postman cannot, so I would appreciate it if anyone familiar with both tools can point out a value proposition for switching apps.
    - bitexploder 10y ago
      Take a look at Burp. It is a big giant native app that has its home in information security, but it is generally the best testing proxy I have ever seen. My customers end up having postman for various things and it is almost always my first mission to get things into Burp. You may be turned off that it is not a pretty app (It is a Java GUI app after all). But I have used it for 9 years and found that the UX is generally very good, just not flashy. Compared to some aggravations I have had with Postman and the general lack of depth in the tooling. Amongst information security practitioners Burp is basically the gold standard and whenever I introduce developers to it they like it. Finally, there is mitmproxy, which I have been using more and more. Between these two tools Postman feels like a fiddly bastard. Finally, I took a look through the Paw docs. I watched some videos. Based on how they were demoing things I think it would drive me crazy. The flow in Burp or mitmproxy is so much faster. Step 1.) Proxy a bunch of traffic. Step 2.) Go find the requests you liked and send them to repeater and or save them. Step 3.) Modify the requests into nice test cases. Step 4.) Replay the requests Repeat. You end up with a nice test suite. My test suites are often better than what the developers have available with the added bonus of finding security vulnerabilities :) Other benefits, these tools are designed to do sneaky things, like transparent proxying. I can transparently proxy some or all app traffic, even SSLd apps (e.g. production builds). These tools like Postman and Paw, these basic HTTP clients, are like crude hammers when we need a finely tuned and weighted hammer of an exacting specification to do repeatable assessment work. Anyway, my perspective isn't /quite/ right for software developers. My tool requirements are based on needing to transparently proxy virtually any sort of HTTP(S) client. Development shops often want a tool that lets them build repeatable client requests that are easy to work with to test their backends without screwing around with the full app (mobile app, SPA, whatever it is). So I trade off some niceness in terms of built in organization (though, honestly, not a lot if you use Burp correctly), for ultimate flexibility and security testing features that you would not need as much. That said, I can't help but look down my nose a little at all of these new tools like Postman and Paw. (Especially given how much Paw costs). But I know dev shops that get along fine with Postman and it is a nice and easy enough tool. I didn't see a single feature in Paw I don't use all the time in Burp. The one feature that Burp doesn't have is making client request code. The best part is it being, basically automatic after having exercised the client. Bah it is late, and I am just throwing a bunch of stuff at ya. Anyway, give the Burp trial a whirl and see what you think.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - BillinghamJ 10y ago
    Unfortunately it is increasingly unstable and has dire performance issues - particularly when using the cloud/team sync system :(
  - eknkc 10y ago
    I paid for Paw and can't stand using it. One of few macOS apps that I gave up after purchasing. Things like entering JSON body requires using a gui resembling the plist editor or going for raw text input. But then you need to add a content type header manually. And there is no syntax highlighting or anything like that when you do it that way. Postman handles this better. Or that the left menu has a manually managed request list. I'm not sure if there is a history listing all changed requests I made in order. Maybe there is because I see a History menubar item that can clear history. How can I see the request I made just before this one? No idea. Postman is also better on this. Left list shows all requests. I guess the workflow is not firing it up and trying out some things but constructing a project with environments, requests etc.. Never bothered to do that in detail (see next item). Want to have a decent UI to contruct HTTP requests and execute them.. Even if I tried to use the project stuff, having that project file on a git repo is cumbersome because it's a binary file and Paw touches it even if you just open it up so Git shows a diff. It used to require a protocol (http:// http://) before the url. I think it does not anymore. Why would an http client not default to http protocol? Guess it's not for my type of usage. I mostly go with httpie these days.
  - statictype 10y ago
    Ugh. This used to be true until version 3. The Paw native experience is now terrible. I'd welcome a nice embedded app in electron.
    - hishnash 10y ago
      @statictype What issues are you having?
  - charlieegan3 10y ago
    I really can't recommend this any more either - it used to be really nice but it seems to crash most times I come to use it now. There seem to be updates coming out regularly but they don't seem to fix the issues I'm having.
    - theonemind 10y ago
      I've found the developer pretty responsive to bug reports, which is nice.
- a85 10y ago
  It's not just an embedded instance of Chromium. There are APIs that bridge the gap with the operating system. One way to look at this is that the UI layer runs on HTML/CSS/Javascript. VS Code, Slack etc. are other common examples. [Electron APIs]: https://electron.atom.io/docs/api/ https://electron.atom.io/docs/api/
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    Right. It's Chromium + JS APIs + some packaging. E.g. an API to write a file.
    - Rapzid 10y ago
      That's a bit too simplistic of an explanation IMHO. It's a mashup of chromium and nodejs; the entry point is a nodejs app.
    - pininja 10y ago
      Window, Menus, clipboard, etc.. (not just being able to write to a file) https://electron.atom.io/docs/api/ https://electron.atom.io/docs/api/
    - pier25 10y ago
      All OS related functionality is through Node.
    - JSDave 10y ago
      Electron gives you a view process, background process, and a way for the 2 to communicate. The view process is very limited, just standard web APIs. The background process is basically a node process and can do anything you can in node.
      - derefr 10y ago
        Including, importantly, the ability to fork+exec other native processes. You can ship an Electron client app that spawns and then interacts with a native C background service, if you like. (I believe that's how Keybase's native client works, in fact.)
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  Sure, if you translate "embedded" as being more powerful/low-level than "standalone".
- derefr 10y ago
  Electron is to desktop computers as PhoneGap is to mobile devices: not just a framework that embeds web views, but also an API bridge that allows said web-views to access APIs that web-views are normally sandboxed from accessing.
- shawndumas 10y ago
  It's akin to microsoft's HTA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
tbrock 10y ago
The real question is why Chrome will no longer allow Chrome apps?
- ozten 10y ago
  My guess is they are doubling down on Progressive Web Apps. Many users don't understand the "browser is an app store" model. Making installing an "App" a seamless transition for websites you constantly use, seems like a UX improvement, if Progressive can deliver on it's vision.
  - a85 10y ago
    Yeah. That plus I believe it became exponentially difficult for the Chrome team to deliver a set of APIs for apps to replicate native experiences. One example was the menu bar. Apparently it would have required rewriting parts of Chromium in a generic way so Chrome could have its own menu bar AND allow customizability for apps. I was tracking bugs on the Chromium tracker for a while but don't have these links handy at this moment.
juice_bus 10y ago
I am really getting tired of the constant "need an account" for _everything_ - nvidia being the one that drives me the most crazy. I appreciate the fact that Postman allows you to continue without registration[0] [0]http://i.imgur.com/8XVCu5u.png http://i.imgur.com/8XVCu5u.png
- _pdp_ 10y ago
  Maybe not Postman but at least you don't need an account: https://rest.secapps.com/ https://rest.secapps.com/ - https://httpview.secapps.com/ https://httpview.secapps.com/ - #disclosure I am the author and we are making some substantial changes to make our tools available without registration
- fimdomeio 10y ago
  What I would love would be a git friendly app. keep the collection as a file that I can keep on the repo and them commit the new changes in the code.
  - prebrov 10y ago
    Paw uses git under the hood when you use its sync service (available for free), it seems. Unfortunately, you can't sync with your own repo, which is a shame for a fairly expensive rest client, compared to alternatives. I use and love it way more than Postman nevertheless.
    - hishnash 10y ago
      We use libgit2 server side, Paw does not talk GIT it talks json to our syncing service. (the repo format we have would not be very nice if you wanted to embed it in another project, since we split out each object in Paw into a separate yaml file to reduce merge conflicts, this means even small projects in Paw can be 1000s of files) During merges etc we run extra validation on the project to ensure we dont get corruption. (this is not easily possible with repos hosted on github etc) (paw backend dev here)
aberatiu 10y ago
My 2 cents. Try and add a notification within your Chrome App that there's a native version of your app as well. 'Cuz since now, although I've been using your app for more than a year now, I didn't know about the native version of the app. PS: Paying customer :)
- a85 10y ago
  Yep. :) Up next. (Postman founder here)
ummjackson 10y ago
Hmm, does Electron really == "native" ??
- a85 10y ago
  == yes but probably not ===
  - Rapzid 10y ago
    oh.snap()
- colordrops 10y ago
  It's a native binary executable with standard access to system APIs, so in the technical sense, yes.
  - josephg 10y ago
    That just makes the platform native, which doesn't say anything at all. Presumably the app itself is still written in javascript, so its not native at all - its just bundling its own (native) copy of chrome.
    - colordrops 10y ago
      So are you saying anything with a runtime is not native, even if embedded in an executable? Is a go app native?
      - meditationapp 10y ago
        Does a go app use the native toolkit? QT isn't native either.
        danieldk 10y ago
        Actually, Qt (as in Qt Widgets) is a peculiar case. Qt draws its own widgets, but on some platforms uses native theming APIs to draw widgets (e.g. HITheme in macOS[1]). Though they are apparently experimenting with native widgets now [2]. So I'd say Qt is more native than e.g. Electron, but it is definitely not completely native. Except on Linux of course. [1] http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/qmacstyle.html#details http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/qmacstyle.html#details [2] http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/06/native-look-feel/ http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/06/native-look-feel/
Animats 10y ago
With a name like "Postman", one might expect this has something to do with mail, or messaging. The blog post gives no clue as to what it's for. It's apparently a test tool for testing HTTP-based APIs. [1] (HTTP "POST", get it?) Not to be confused with Postman Corporation, which is a "computer repair shop" near CIA headquarters. [1] https://www.getpostman.com/ https://www.getpostman.com/
- blizkreeg 10y ago
  It's a fairly well known tool if you're a consumer/producer of APIs for web/mobile dev. May be that's why?
  - smlacy 10y ago
    No its not. :) Blog has no product description, and even the product description on getpostman.com (below the fold) is amazingly vague: "A powerful GUI platform to make your API development faster & easier, from building API requests through testing, documentation and sharing." So... It's a text editor? A test framework? What languages does it work with? Web APIs or native? Why would I use it over my existing toolchain?
    - tragic 10y ago
      In the time it took you to write this post, you could have googled it like thirty times. What's your point? It's just a gui version of curl with helpful things like an editor for post bodies, persistence of old requests, stuff like that.
      - smlacy 10y ago
        Point is that if they're selling a product, they could make it more clear what the thing they're selling is. I'm EXACTLY the target market, and they failed to entice me.
        nuggien 10y ago
aphextron 10y ago
"Native"
johnflan 10y ago
These 'native' wrapped apps on desktop and mobile are always less in some way than a real native app. I know there is a cost benefit argument, but I personally avoid them.
- CountSessine 10y ago
  I don't think that that's always true. I think the gold-standard for this is Slack (at least on OSX). Spotify is nice too. Both seem to combine the very best of web dev (nice presentation and service integration) while cancelling out its worst problems (like accidental browser navigation).
  - josephg 10y ago
    Gold standard? Slack is 380 megs in size, and when its open it somehow seems to constantly use about 5% CPU usage (which probably knocks out a few hours of battery life, since the CPU can't properly sleep). Every so often I catch it sitting on 100% cpu usage (this is all while in the background). Restarting slack fixes it. I know that programmer time is more important than CPU time, but its my CPU and my battery. I can only imagine explaining to someone from 15 years ago what software looks like now. "Oh yeah in the future we all use IRC, except its a proprietary IRC implementation and supports animated gifs. The client is 380 megs" "Calm down - I know thats bigger than your hard drive. No its not 3d or anything - it just has nice colors." I don't understand why people hate on apple for not making laptops with 32 gigs of ram, but they have no problem using apps like slack which waste resources like it was water. Thankfully slack seems to be much more lean when run inside a safari browser tab.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      > Slack is 380 MB For comparison: The entire Java 8 (Windows, 64-bit, offline) JVM plus all libraries (which, thanks Java 9, will no longer be necessary) is 62MB: http://javadl.oracle.com/webapps/download/AutoDL?BundleId=218833_e9e7ea248e2c4826b92b3f075a80e441 http://javadl.oracle.com/webapps/download/AutoDL?BundleId=21... Why do people complain that Java is sooo wasteful again? You can literally bundle the entire JVM multiple times with every single Java program, and still use 6 times less space! SIX. For comparison, the new Minecraft Launcher uses Electron. The entire JVM + every Minecraft version ever, plus assets, plus all mobile editions uses less space than it. In a usual minecraft installation, the actual game uses on average between 7 and 15% of the required space, the remaining 85 to 93% being used by the launcher (specifically, the bundled Chrome runtime) Where did our society go wrong?
luhn 10y ago
I've been on the native app for a while and was very glad to switch. The pseudo-standalone Chrome app had some very weird and obnoxious behavior when navigating between applications and windows on MacOS.
- a85 10y ago
  We waited and waited and waited for Chrome to fix this. :/
jsmeaton 10y ago
I'm a big fan of postman, and I've been using the native app for a few months. It's great for exploring apis then dumping the code into either curl or requests for Python.
- a85 10y ago
  Thanks for the comment! (Postman founder here)
- hayden592 10y ago
  I really like this feature too
jitix 10y ago
This is a great news. I was looking for a decent, free ReST client for Mac for a long time.
elmalto 10y ago
Gladly switched today after the plugin, although installed in "normal" Chrome, opened up Canary every time I used it.
bpicolo 10y ago
Thank goodness. The biggest problem with the chrome app is that alt+tabbing to Chrome will foreground Postman instead. Such a pain!
- always_good 10y ago
  Yeah, it was a constant dance of `cmd-tab` and `cmd-tilde` on OSX, which unfortunately was the reason I lost interest in it.
anilshanbhag 10y ago
I didn't know Postman had a proxy. I was about to pay to use Charles proxy.
Mayzie 10y ago
Can we not conflate "native" and "electron" applications? Thanks.
_pdp_ 10y ago
You don't have to be native although it looks like Chrome Apps will be gone. SecApps (https://rest.secapps.com https://rest.secapps.com) for example utilises a Chrome extension and while it is not perfect it is still a webapp. My point is that the Web is very powerful platform and I don't think we should always undermine it because it is not native!
hizanberg 10y ago
When did we start calling Electron Apps, Native Apps? Is it now a marketing ploy to call your App native when it's not? If your App renders in a WebView then by definition it's not native and shouldn't be labelled as such so it doesn't devalue Apps that use Native OS's UI components and idioms that are truly Native. If it has a mix of native and WebView controls then it's at best a Hybrid App.
- kangoo1707 10y ago
  If an app can be installed the same way a "native" app does, it is a native app. Users do not care about the technology behind the scene and what they are called.
  - throwaway2048 10y ago
    They care when an app is a laggy mess that eats battery, cpu and memory like crazy
  - Deusdies 10y ago
    So in your opinion, are Cordova apps also native apps?
  - fnordsensei 10y ago
    Aren't we conflating "desktop app" with "native app" in that case? Why do users have to be exposed to the word "native" at all? Just say "desktop app".
  - flukus 10y ago
    Java apps could be installed and never used to be considered native. Native means "uses the OS UI components".
  - wishinghand 10y ago
    All native apps are desktop apps, but not all desktop apps are native apps.
    - 10y ago
smlacy 10y ago
This Fails my simple "I've never heard of Postman, can you please explain it?" * Blog post (linked) is very vague, no "About Postman" or similar link. * Toplevel of blog page is the same, no "About Postman" or "What is Postman" link. * Toplevel of "postman.com" is amazingly, similarly vague, with the most descriptive text above the fold being: > "Developing APIs is hard. Postman makes it easy. Download the free Postman App" * Still, there's no "About" link or anywhere obvious to actually describe what the product is. I clicked on ALL of the tabs in the upper right: "Products", "Pricing", "Documentation" and "Cummunity" and NONE OF THESE has any text explaining what Postman is or why I would want it. If your site(s) don't have a simple "Postman is a ..." or "Postman can help you..." paragraph, then you've absolutely failed to attract your target market.
- dom2 10y ago
  Main page scroll down, "A powerful GUI platform to make your API development faster & easier, from building API requests through testing, documentation and sharing."
  - smlacy 10y ago
    So this is a text editor?
    - chrisan 10y ago
      > So this is a text editor? You are saying... "A powerful GUI platform to make your API development faster & easier, from building API requests through testing, documentation and sharing." makes you think a text editor, really?
  - dkersten 10y ago
    I still have no idea what it is.
sirius87 10y ago
Great news. I hope this means getting Postman to use the system proxy [1] would be seamless. Gave it a shot a few months back, didn't bother debugging though. [1] https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/2225 https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/22...
lalmachado 10y ago
I gave up using postman a while time ago because I was thinking that they had not an app outside the Chrome. I started using insomnia(https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/) and I am satisfied
- richthegeek 10y ago
  Exactly the same experience here. Postman always felt a little laggy and the in-app pushing for premium features was getting annoying. Insomnia does everything I want it to do and does it quickly.
  - gschier 10y ago
    Developer of Insomnia here, and I'd just like to say that it makes me happy to see people in the wild are enjoying the app! Oh, and there are some big, fancy, and awesome things coming ;)
a85 10y ago
Postman founder here HN folks. Great to see the post get featured on the homepage! Lots of discussion about what is exactly native. I have posted some replies but some other points about the choice of words: 1. Postman has 3 million users and about 1.5 million MAUs. When we tell people we have a native app, they get it. People go to our apps page, download the installer and see everything exactly as they expect things to be. 2. We have worked hard on optimizing our UI layer over the past several months including mapping of keyboard shortcuts and smoothening out performance issues. 3. We are able to provide a consistent experience for Windows, Linux and macOS users and people love that EVERYONE in the team can use the same app. That has very clear advantages when development teams are chosing tools. Postman is used by everyone who comes in touch with APIs - product managers, sales, customer support, dev evangelists and a cross-platform app allows everyone to standardize much faster. 4. Reusability in the code base through node packages is amazing to have. 5. We use React and are aiming for reusability of these components in the browser. This includes stuff like visualizations, data rendering etc. Our time to market has come down like crazy. 6. With node, not only do we get reusability across OSes but also between the app and our server-side stuff. We have a command line tool called newman that uses the same runtime (postman-runtime, open-sourced on Github) and the same runtime powers our monitoring service that runs on the cloud. That's just some of the advantages. There is a lot of work going on in optimizing our code base. Ultimately we are validated by whether we do a good job for people who use the application. I have been building Postman over the past 5 years now and that has been the core guiding princple.
- psyklic 10y ago
  >> When we tell people we have a native app, they get it. People go to our apps page, download the installer and see everything exactly as they expect things to be. The term "native" is used to describe apps developed for a specific operating system. By this definition, clearly Electron apps (and hence Postman) are not native apps. Having to download an installer doesn't make it native. On smartphones, all apps are installed in the same way. Yet, some are native and others use WebViews. I am making no comment on Postman's quality (in fact I am a customer). However, advertising Postman as native seems a bit disconcerting to me.
neves 10y ago
Read the article, went to home page, clicked in Documentation and still don't know what the application does. Can someone resume in 2 phrases?
- beart 10y ago
  Basically, it's a program for running tests against an API (HTTP VERBS).
- fatal510 10y ago
  You couldn't go to getpostman.com and scroll down a little bit to see a screenshot of it that quickly and clearly gives you an idea of what it does? You're hopeless.
hayden592 10y ago
Big fan of Postman for quickly iterating on API's, microservice integration tests, and one off requests. However, my team keeps the collections in git and they are very difficult to diff. This almost always require a detailed commit (doesnt usually happen) or me asking the dev what they changed. Any suggestions on how to improve comparing two collections?
- a85 10y ago
  Thanks for the comment! If you are on Postman Pro you can export to Github directly. There is versioning built-in Pro too. That said, we have improved the format a lot over the years to support diffing just with Git.
dopamean 10y ago
I think it's really disappointing that so many of the commenters here have chosen to nitpick on the author's choice of the word native and then debating whether it was a good idea for them to use Electron. How about we all try out the app for a few days and the come report back about our experience?
- danieldk 10y ago
  It is not really nitpicking when most Electron apps use tens to hundreds of megabytes of memory. If all the utility apps that I use regularly switched to electron, I would need an order of magnitude more RAM. Moreover, these applications are then completely 'unnative' in the sense that the widgets do not look native on my OS, the widget behaviour is not native to my OS, the usual keyboard shortcuts are broken, etc. Electron apps are the Java Swing applications of this decennium.
  - a85 10y ago
    I am pretty surprised how some commenters here are using this argument. Of course, EVERY utility app should NOT be written in Electron. I have commented on the UI and keyboard shortcuts elsewhere. These are easily doable and I believe libraries to pre-package and solve this exist already.
rosstex 10y ago
I prefer the Interceptor extension to using proxy settings.
therealmarv 10y ago
Can I still use login on a web interface (cookie and interceptor) and use an API with that cookie in place? It was my workflow with the Chrome app.
- a85 10y ago
  We are working on connecting the Interceptor with the native apps. Need a few tweaks in the codebase. :)
umen 10y ago
When you will learn Native it is not electron It is webview working offline
masthead 10y ago
I have had developed chrome apps and extensions in the past, and this is totally relatable. Chrome sucks in terms of providing support to developers and building robust features. (Coming down to Indiranagar for a treat from your end. :P)
kyberias 10y ago
I don't want to "sign in to a Postman account" to download it. Sorry, I'll use something else. UPDATE: I stand corrected. One can download without signing up. Sorry, I guess I'll try this after all :)
- masthead 10y ago
  There's a secret option to skip it. You don't have to sign in to use it
rvanmil 10y ago
I thought this might be a nice alternative to Paw. But nope, yet another Electron app misleadingly marketed as "native", nevermind.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
fnord123 10y ago
This appears to be an electron program. Is that native? I thought it was a specialized browser just for the program. I thought native was more akin to the wikipedia definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_%28computing%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_%28computing%29
spookyuser 10y ago
I love postman. The whole program is extremely well designed, and the dark theme looks fantastic. Might even be better than Darcula on intelliJ :p Since the author is in the comments just wanted to ask one thing. Is this [1] supposed to be misaligned? [1]https://i.imgur.com/aw8ybBz.png https://i.imgur.com/aw8ybBz.png
- chrisan 10y ago
  My goodness... I've been using postman for a long time and I never noticed themes before. Thank you (or I guess really thank you a85)!
mythz 10y ago
The title of this post should've been: > How we avoided going native, and built an App with Electron instead
tempodox 10y ago
One of those insider-only jokes. Not even their Products page says what it actually is.
- a85 10y ago
  It does a lot of things. The table should help https://www.getpostman.com/products https://www.getpostman.com/products (essentially everything with API development)
martin-adams 10y ago
I absolutely love the Postman app, well done and thank you! My biggest frustration with native apps are things like the Google login. Without it being in a browser, I have no way to verify that I'm looking at a legitimate login, or a fake one, right through to 2 factor authentication.
- a85 10y ago
  Thank you for the comment! I think there are ways to represent this better (just with a URL bar for example). Will look into it.
  - martin-adams 10y ago
    I'm not sure how easy that is to solve, because again, a rogue app could fake the URL bar. It's just the nature of desktop apps vs the browser as the browser is there the trust is. Maybe passing it to a browser for authentication is the only option. Now I've been using Postman for many years, so I certainly trust the quality and intent of your work.
felipebueno 10y ago
Slightly off-topic: On my current job we use the Postman Chrome app to test out apis. I'm looking for a FOSS command-line alternative to it because it's very slow on my laptop (Linux, Celeron, HDD, 4GB RAM) and the UI makes no sense to me. I know I could just use cURL (which I do) and/or HTTPie but it would be nice to have options. Is there any alternative that would suit my needs?
- czardoz 10y ago
  We have a CLI for Postman: https://github.com/postmanlabs/newman https://github.com/postmanlabs/newman But it's currently geared towards running collections created in the Postman App (i.e, it's not for one-off requests like cURL is).
  - felipebueno 10y ago
    Hey, that looks useful! I'll take a look at it later. Thanks! :) Oh, btw: I read my comment again right now and it sounds a little bit arrogant. I'm sorry about that... By saying it's slow and that I don't like the UI, I mean no offense to you guys. Actually, I think Postman is a very useful tool and my co-workers seem to love it. I's just not for me and my crappy laptop hahah.
cobalt 10y ago
Everyone seems to be commenting on this, but I would consider this to be a standalone app, but not a native app
notsrg 10y ago
Been happily using postman for a couple years now and happily don't care that you called an electron app a native app. Sorry HN is so aggressively pedantic!

287 points by Garbage 10y ago

"The native apps cover all the features and functionality of the Chrome app and Chrome extension together, and more. The native apps run on Electron overcoming a lot of the restrictions of the Chrome platform." My understanding was that Electron is just an embedded instance of Chromium, so I'm reading this sentence more like "The native apps run on [embedded Chromium] overcoming a lot of the restrictions of the [standalone Chromium] platform."

abrowne 10y ago
Yeah, kind of a stretch to call it "native".
EduardoBautista 10y ago
Yup. Luckily, there is Paw[0] if you want a native experience on the mac. [0]: https://paw.cloud https://paw.cloud
- xenadu02 10y ago
  I had the pleasure of emailing the creator of Paw when he was looking at applying to YC. It's a great app and I recommend it.
- eyko 10y ago
  I liked paw, but postman is free. I'd consider paw at half the price because I don't spend that much time testing REST APIs, but when I do I don't mind using a better tool than httpie or curl. Postman does the job (quite well) for free.
  - a85 10y ago
    We do have a subscription service now called Postman Pro - does API documentation (api.getpostman.com), API Monitoring, Mock servers, Team collaboration and it has a powerful API (api.getpostman.com). More coming soon! Postman - the app will always remain free. :) (Founder here)
  - gschier 10y ago
    There's another free REST client called Insomnia (https://insomnia.rest https://insomnia.rest), which I've been working on for the past two years, but I don't think there are any other popular "native" options. For some reason, all of the REST clients seem to be Chrome apps. It will be unfortunate when Google sunsets Chrome apps next year :(
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Paw looks like a really nice, slick, professional tool. I've been using Postman for years and really like it, and am used to it. I've yet to see a 'use case' where Paw can do something that Postman cannot, so I would appreciate it if anyone familiar with both tools can point out a value proposition for switching apps.
  - bitexploder 10y ago
    Take a look at Burp. It is a big giant native app that has its home in information security, but it is generally the best testing proxy I have ever seen. My customers end up having postman for various things and it is almost always my first mission to get things into Burp. You may be turned off that it is not a pretty app (It is a Java GUI app after all). But I have used it for 9 years and found that the UX is generally very good, just not flashy. Compared to some aggravations I have had with Postman and the general lack of depth in the tooling. Amongst information security practitioners Burp is basically the gold standard and whenever I introduce developers to it they like it. Finally, there is mitmproxy, which I have been using more and more. Between these two tools Postman feels like a fiddly bastard. Finally, I took a look through the Paw docs. I watched some videos. Based on how they were demoing things I think it would drive me crazy. The flow in Burp or mitmproxy is so much faster. Step 1.) Proxy a bunch of traffic. Step 2.) Go find the requests you liked and send them to repeater and or save them. Step 3.) Modify the requests into nice test cases. Step 4.) Replay the requests Repeat. You end up with a nice test suite. My test suites are often better than what the developers have available with the added bonus of finding security vulnerabilities :) Other benefits, these tools are designed to do sneaky things, like transparent proxying. I can transparently proxy some or all app traffic, even SSLd apps (e.g. production builds). These tools like Postman and Paw, these basic HTTP clients, are like crude hammers when we need a finely tuned and weighted hammer of an exacting specification to do repeatable assessment work. Anyway, my perspective isn't /quite/ right for software developers. My tool requirements are based on needing to transparently proxy virtually any sort of HTTP(S) client. Development shops often want a tool that lets them build repeatable client requests that are easy to work with to test their backends without screwing around with the full app (mobile app, SPA, whatever it is). So I trade off some niceness in terms of built in organization (though, honestly, not a lot if you use Burp correctly), for ultimate flexibility and security testing features that you would not need as much. That said, I can't help but look down my nose a little at all of these new tools like Postman and Paw. (Especially given how much Paw costs). But I know dev shops that get along fine with Postman and it is a nice and easy enough tool. I didn't see a single feature in Paw I don't use all the time in Burp. The one feature that Burp doesn't have is making client request code. The best part is it being, basically automatic after having exercised the client. Bah it is late, and I am just throwing a bunch of stuff at ya. Anyway, give the Burp trial a whirl and see what you think.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- BillinghamJ 10y ago
  Unfortunately it is increasingly unstable and has dire performance issues - particularly when using the cloud/team sync system :(
- eknkc 10y ago
  I paid for Paw and can't stand using it. One of few macOS apps that I gave up after purchasing. Things like entering JSON body requires using a gui resembling the plist editor or going for raw text input. But then you need to add a content type header manually. And there is no syntax highlighting or anything like that when you do it that way. Postman handles this better. Or that the left menu has a manually managed request list. I'm not sure if there is a history listing all changed requests I made in order. Maybe there is because I see a History menubar item that can clear history. How can I see the request I made just before this one? No idea. Postman is also better on this. Left list shows all requests. I guess the workflow is not firing it up and trying out some things but constructing a project with environments, requests etc.. Never bothered to do that in detail (see next item). Want to have a decent UI to contruct HTTP requests and execute them.. Even if I tried to use the project stuff, having that project file on a git repo is cumbersome because it's a binary file and Paw touches it even if you just open it up so Git shows a diff. It used to require a protocol (http:// http://) before the url. I think it does not anymore. Why would an http client not default to http protocol? Guess it's not for my type of usage. I mostly go with httpie these days.
- statictype 10y ago
  Ugh. This used to be true until version 3. The Paw native experience is now terrible. I'd welcome a nice embedded app in electron.
  - hishnash 10y ago
    @statictype What issues are you having?
- charlieegan3 10y ago
  I really can't recommend this any more either - it used to be really nice but it seems to crash most times I come to use it now. There seem to be updates coming out regularly but they don't seem to fix the issues I'm having.
  - theonemind 10y ago
    I've found the developer pretty responsive to bug reports, which is nice.
a85 10y ago
It's not just an embedded instance of Chromium. There are APIs that bridge the gap with the operating system. One way to look at this is that the UI layer runs on HTML/CSS/Javascript. VS Code, Slack etc. are other common examples. [Electron APIs]: https://electron.atom.io/docs/api/ https://electron.atom.io/docs/api/
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Right. It's Chromium + JS APIs + some packaging. E.g. an API to write a file.
  - Rapzid 10y ago
    That's a bit too simplistic of an explanation IMHO. It's a mashup of chromium and nodejs; the entry point is a nodejs app.
  - pininja 10y ago
    Window, Menus, clipboard, etc.. (not just being able to write to a file) https://electron.atom.io/docs/api/ https://electron.atom.io/docs/api/
  - pier25 10y ago
    All OS related functionality is through Node.
  - JSDave 10y ago
    Electron gives you a view process, background process, and a way for the 2 to communicate. The view process is very limited, just standard web APIs. The background process is basically a node process and can do anything you can in node.
    - derefr 10y ago
      Including, importantly, the ability to fork+exec other native processes. You can ship an Electron client app that spawns and then interacts with a native C background service, if you like. (I believe that's how Keybase's native client works, in fact.)
LeifCarrotson 10y ago
Sure, if you translate "embedded" as being more powerful/low-level than "standalone".
derefr 10y ago
Electron is to desktop computers as PhoneGap is to mobile devices: not just a framework that embeds web views, but also an API bridge that allows said web-views to access APIs that web-views are normally sandboxed from accessing.
shawndumas 10y ago
It's akin to microsoft's HTA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

tbrock 10y ago

The real question is why Chrome will no longer allow Chrome apps?

ozten 10y ago
My guess is they are doubling down on Progressive Web Apps. Many users don't understand the "browser is an app store" model. Making installing an "App" a seamless transition for websites you constantly use, seems like a UX improvement, if Progressive can deliver on it's vision.
- a85 10y ago
  Yeah. That plus I believe it became exponentially difficult for the Chrome team to deliver a set of APIs for apps to replicate native experiences. One example was the menu bar. Apparently it would have required rewriting parts of Chromium in a generic way so Chrome could have its own menu bar AND allow customizability for apps. I was tracking bugs on the Chromium tracker for a while but don't have these links handy at this moment.

juice_bus 10y ago

I am really getting tired of the constant "need an account" for _everything_ - nvidia being the one that drives me the most crazy. I appreciate the fact that Postman allows you to continue without registration[0] [0]http://i.imgur.com/8XVCu5u.png http://i.imgur.com/8XVCu5u.png

_pdp_ 10y ago
Maybe not Postman but at least you don't need an account: https://rest.secapps.com/ https://rest.secapps.com/ - https://httpview.secapps.com/ https://httpview.secapps.com/ - #disclosure I am the author and we are making some substantial changes to make our tools available without registration
fimdomeio 10y ago
What I would love would be a git friendly app. keep the collection as a file that I can keep on the repo and them commit the new changes in the code.
- prebrov 10y ago
  Paw uses git under the hood when you use its sync service (available for free), it seems. Unfortunately, you can't sync with your own repo, which is a shame for a fairly expensive rest client, compared to alternatives. I use and love it way more than Postman nevertheless.
  - hishnash 10y ago
    We use libgit2 server side, Paw does not talk GIT it talks json to our syncing service. (the repo format we have would not be very nice if you wanted to embed it in another project, since we split out each object in Paw into a separate yaml file to reduce merge conflicts, this means even small projects in Paw can be 1000s of files) During merges etc we run extra validation on the project to ensure we dont get corruption. (this is not easily possible with repos hosted on github etc) (paw backend dev here)

aberatiu 10y ago

My 2 cents. Try and add a notification within your Chrome App that there's a native version of your app as well. 'Cuz since now, although I've been using your app for more than a year now, I didn't know about the native version of the app. PS: Paying customer :)

a85 10y ago
Yep. :) Up next. (Postman founder here)

ummjackson 10y ago

Hmm, does Electron really == "native" ??

a85 10y ago
== yes but probably not ===
- Rapzid 10y ago
  oh.snap()
colordrops 10y ago
It's a native binary executable with standard access to system APIs, so in the technical sense, yes.
- josephg 10y ago
  That just makes the platform native, which doesn't say anything at all. Presumably the app itself is still written in javascript, so its not native at all - its just bundling its own (native) copy of chrome.
  - colordrops 10y ago
    So are you saying anything with a runtime is not native, even if embedded in an executable? Is a go app native?
    - meditationapp 10y ago
      Does a go app use the native toolkit? QT isn't native either.
      - danieldk 10y ago
        Actually, Qt (as in Qt Widgets) is a peculiar case. Qt draws its own widgets, but on some platforms uses native theming APIs to draw widgets (e.g. HITheme in macOS[1]). Though they are apparently experimenting with native widgets now [2]. So I'd say Qt is more native than e.g. Electron, but it is definitely not completely native. Except on Linux of course. [1] http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/qmacstyle.html#details http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/qmacstyle.html#details [2] http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/06/native-look-feel/ http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/06/native-look-feel/

Animats 10y ago

With a name like "Postman", one might expect this has something to do with mail, or messaging. The blog post gives no clue as to what it's for. It's apparently a test tool for testing HTTP-based APIs. [1] (HTTP "POST", get it?) Not to be confused with Postman Corporation, which is a "computer repair shop" near CIA headquarters. [1] https://www.getpostman.com/ https://www.getpostman.com/

blizkreeg 10y ago
It's a fairly well known tool if you're a consumer/producer of APIs for web/mobile dev. May be that's why?
- smlacy 10y ago
  No its not. :) Blog has no product description, and even the product description on getpostman.com (below the fold) is amazingly vague: "A powerful GUI platform to make your API development faster & easier, from building API requests through testing, documentation and sharing." So... It's a text editor? A test framework? What languages does it work with? Web APIs or native? Why would I use it over my existing toolchain?
  - tragic 10y ago
    In the time it took you to write this post, you could have googled it like thirty times. What's your point? It's just a gui version of curl with helpful things like an editor for post bodies, persistence of old requests, stuff like that.
    - smlacy 10y ago
      Point is that if they're selling a product, they could make it more clear what the thing they're selling is. I'm EXACTLY the target market, and they failed to entice me.
      - nuggien 10y ago

aphextron 10y ago

"Native"

johnflan 10y ago

These 'native' wrapped apps on desktop and mobile are always less in some way than a real native app. I know there is a cost benefit argument, but I personally avoid them.

CountSessine 10y ago
I don't think that that's always true. I think the gold-standard for this is Slack (at least on OSX). Spotify is nice too. Both seem to combine the very best of web dev (nice presentation and service integration) while cancelling out its worst problems (like accidental browser navigation).
- josephg 10y ago
  Gold standard? Slack is 380 megs in size, and when its open it somehow seems to constantly use about 5% CPU usage (which probably knocks out a few hours of battery life, since the CPU can't properly sleep). Every so often I catch it sitting on 100% cpu usage (this is all while in the background). Restarting slack fixes it. I know that programmer time is more important than CPU time, but its my CPU and my battery. I can only imagine explaining to someone from 15 years ago what software looks like now. "Oh yeah in the future we all use IRC, except its a proprietary IRC implementation and supports animated gifs. The client is 380 megs" "Calm down - I know thats bigger than your hard drive. No its not 3d or anything - it just has nice colors." I don't understand why people hate on apple for not making laptops with 32 gigs of ram, but they have no problem using apps like slack which waste resources like it was water. Thankfully slack seems to be much more lean when run inside a safari browser tab.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > Slack is 380 MB For comparison: The entire Java 8 (Windows, 64-bit, offline) JVM plus all libraries (which, thanks Java 9, will no longer be necessary) is 62MB: http://javadl.oracle.com/webapps/download/AutoDL?BundleId=218833_e9e7ea248e2c4826b92b3f075a80e441 http://javadl.oracle.com/webapps/download/AutoDL?BundleId=21... Why do people complain that Java is sooo wasteful again? You can literally bundle the entire JVM multiple times with every single Java program, and still use 6 times less space! SIX. For comparison, the new Minecraft Launcher uses Electron. The entire JVM + every Minecraft version ever, plus assets, plus all mobile editions uses less space than it. In a usual minecraft installation, the actual game uses on average between 7 and 15% of the required space, the remaining 85 to 93% being used by the launcher (specifically, the bundled Chrome runtime) Where did our society go wrong?

luhn 10y ago

I've been on the native app for a while and was very glad to switch. The pseudo-standalone Chrome app had some very weird and obnoxious behavior when navigating between applications and windows on MacOS.

a85 10y ago
We waited and waited and waited for Chrome to fix this. :/

jsmeaton 10y ago

I'm a big fan of postman, and I've been using the native app for a few months. It's great for exploring apis then dumping the code into either curl or requests for Python.

a85 10y ago
Thanks for the comment! (Postman founder here)
hayden592 10y ago
I really like this feature too

jitix 10y ago

This is a great news. I was looking for a decent, free ReST client for Mac for a long time.

elmalto 10y ago

Gladly switched today after the plugin, although installed in "normal" Chrome, opened up Canary every time I used it.

bpicolo 10y ago

Thank goodness. The biggest problem with the chrome app is that alt+tabbing to Chrome will foreground Postman instead. Such a pain!

always_good 10y ago
Yeah, it was a constant dance of `cmd-tab` and `cmd-tilde` on OSX, which unfortunately was the reason I lost interest in it.

anilshanbhag 10y ago

I didn't know Postman had a proxy. I was about to pay to use Charles proxy.

Mayzie 10y ago

Can we not conflate "native" and "electron" applications? Thanks.

_pdp_ 10y ago

You don't have to be native although it looks like Chrome Apps will be gone. SecApps (https://rest.secapps.com https://rest.secapps.com) for example utilises a Chrome extension and while it is not perfect it is still a webapp. My point is that the Web is very powerful platform and I don't think we should always undermine it because it is not native!

hizanberg 10y ago

When did we start calling Electron Apps, Native Apps? Is it now a marketing ploy to call your App native when it's not? If your App renders in a WebView then by definition it's not native and shouldn't be labelled as such so it doesn't devalue Apps that use Native OS's UI components and idioms that are truly Native. If it has a mix of native and WebView controls then it's at best a Hybrid App.

kangoo1707 10y ago
If an app can be installed the same way a "native" app does, it is a native app. Users do not care about the technology behind the scene and what they are called.
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  They care when an app is a laggy mess that eats battery, cpu and memory like crazy
- Deusdies 10y ago
  So in your opinion, are Cordova apps also native apps?
- fnordsensei 10y ago
  Aren't we conflating "desktop app" with "native app" in that case? Why do users have to be exposed to the word "native" at all? Just say "desktop app".
- flukus 10y ago
  Java apps could be installed and never used to be considered native. Native means "uses the OS UI components".
- wishinghand 10y ago
  All native apps are desktop apps, but not all desktop apps are native apps.
  - 10y ago

smlacy 10y ago

This Fails my simple "I've never heard of Postman, can you please explain it?" * Blog post (linked) is very vague, no "About Postman" or similar link. * Toplevel of blog page is the same, no "About Postman" or "What is Postman" link. * Toplevel of "postman.com" is amazingly, similarly vague, with the most descriptive text above the fold being: > "Developing APIs is hard. Postman makes it easy. Download the free Postman App" * Still, there's no "About" link or anywhere obvious to actually describe what the product is. I clicked on ALL of the tabs in the upper right: "Products", "Pricing", "Documentation" and "Cummunity" and NONE OF THESE has any text explaining what Postman is or why I would want it. If your site(s) don't have a simple "Postman is a ..." or "Postman can help you..." paragraph, then you've absolutely failed to attract your target market.

dom2 10y ago
Main page scroll down, "A powerful GUI platform to make your API development faster & easier, from building API requests through testing, documentation and sharing."
- smlacy 10y ago
  So this is a text editor?
  - chrisan 10y ago
    > So this is a text editor? You are saying... "A powerful GUI platform to make your API development faster & easier, from building API requests through testing, documentation and sharing." makes you think a text editor, really?
- dkersten 10y ago
  I still have no idea what it is.

sirius87 10y ago

Great news. I hope this means getting Postman to use the system proxy [1] would be seamless. Gave it a shot a few months back, didn't bother debugging though. [1] https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/2225 https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/22...

lalmachado 10y ago

I gave up using postman a while time ago because I was thinking that they had not an app outside the Chrome. I started using insomnia(https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/) and I am satisfied

richthegeek 10y ago
Exactly the same experience here. Postman always felt a little laggy and the in-app pushing for premium features was getting annoying. Insomnia does everything I want it to do and does it quickly.
- gschier 10y ago
  Developer of Insomnia here, and I'd just like to say that it makes me happy to see people in the wild are enjoying the app! Oh, and there are some big, fancy, and awesome things coming ;)

a85 10y ago

Postman founder here HN folks. Great to see the post get featured on the homepage! Lots of discussion about what is exactly native. I have posted some replies but some other points about the choice of words: 1. Postman has 3 million users and about 1.5 million MAUs. When we tell people we have a native app, they get it. People go to our apps page, download the installer and see everything exactly as they expect things to be. 2. We have worked hard on optimizing our UI layer over the past several months including mapping of keyboard shortcuts and smoothening out performance issues. 3. We are able to provide a consistent experience for Windows, Linux and macOS users and people love that EVERYONE in the team can use the same app. That has very clear advantages when development teams are chosing tools. Postman is used by everyone who comes in touch with APIs - product managers, sales, customer support, dev evangelists and a cross-platform app allows everyone to standardize much faster. 4. Reusability in the code base through node packages is amazing to have. 5. We use React and are aiming for reusability of these components in the browser. This includes stuff like visualizations, data rendering etc. Our time to market has come down like crazy. 6. With node, not only do we get reusability across OSes but also between the app and our server-side stuff. We have a command line tool called newman that uses the same runtime (postman-runtime, open-sourced on Github) and the same runtime powers our monitoring service that runs on the cloud. That's just some of the advantages. There is a lot of work going on in optimizing our code base. Ultimately we are validated by whether we do a good job for people who use the application. I have been building Postman over the past 5 years now and that has been the core guiding princple.

psyklic 10y ago
>> When we tell people we have a native app, they get it. People go to our apps page, download the installer and see everything exactly as they expect things to be. The term "native" is used to describe apps developed for a specific operating system. By this definition, clearly Electron apps (and hence Postman) are not native apps. Having to download an installer doesn't make it native. On smartphones, all apps are installed in the same way. Yet, some are native and others use WebViews. I am making no comment on Postman's quality (in fact I am a customer). However, advertising Postman as native seems a bit disconcerting to me.

neves 10y ago

Read the article, went to home page, clicked in Documentation and still don't know what the application does. Can someone resume in 2 phrases?

beart 10y ago
Basically, it's a program for running tests against an API (HTTP VERBS).
fatal510 10y ago
You couldn't go to getpostman.com and scroll down a little bit to see a screenshot of it that quickly and clearly gives you an idea of what it does? You're hopeless.

hayden592 10y ago

Big fan of Postman for quickly iterating on API's, microservice integration tests, and one off requests. However, my team keeps the collections in git and they are very difficult to diff. This almost always require a detailed commit (doesnt usually happen) or me asking the dev what they changed. Any suggestions on how to improve comparing two collections?

a85 10y ago
Thanks for the comment! If you are on Postman Pro you can export to Github directly. There is versioning built-in Pro too. That said, we have improved the format a lot over the years to support diffing just with Git.

dopamean 10y ago

I think it's really disappointing that so many of the commenters here have chosen to nitpick on the author's choice of the word native and then debating whether it was a good idea for them to use Electron. How about we all try out the app for a few days and the come report back about our experience?

danieldk 10y ago
It is not really nitpicking when most Electron apps use tens to hundreds of megabytes of memory. If all the utility apps that I use regularly switched to electron, I would need an order of magnitude more RAM. Moreover, these applications are then completely 'unnative' in the sense that the widgets do not look native on my OS, the widget behaviour is not native to my OS, the usual keyboard shortcuts are broken, etc. Electron apps are the Java Swing applications of this decennium.
- a85 10y ago
  I am pretty surprised how some commenters here are using this argument. Of course, EVERY utility app should NOT be written in Electron. I have commented on the UI and keyboard shortcuts elsewhere. These are easily doable and I believe libraries to pre-package and solve this exist already.

rosstex 10y ago

I prefer the Interceptor extension to using proxy settings.

therealmarv 10y ago

Can I still use login on a web interface (cookie and interceptor) and use an API with that cookie in place? It was my workflow with the Chrome app.

a85 10y ago
We are working on connecting the Interceptor with the native apps. Need a few tweaks in the codebase. :)

umen 10y ago

When you will learn Native it is not electron It is webview working offline

masthead 10y ago

I have had developed chrome apps and extensions in the past, and this is totally relatable. Chrome sucks in terms of providing support to developers and building robust features. (Coming down to Indiranagar for a treat from your end. :P)

kyberias 10y ago

I don't want to "sign in to a Postman account" to download it. Sorry, I'll use something else. UPDATE: I stand corrected. One can download without signing up. Sorry, I guess I'll try this after all :)

masthead 10y ago
There's a secret option to skip it. You don't have to sign in to use it

rvanmil 10y ago

I thought this might be a nice alternative to Paw. But nope, yet another Electron app misleadingly marketed as "native", nevermind.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

fnord123 10y ago

This appears to be an electron program. Is that native? I thought it was a specialized browser just for the program. I thought native was more akin to the wikipedia definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_%28computing%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_%28computing%29

spookyuser 10y ago

I love postman. The whole program is extremely well designed, and the dark theme looks fantastic. Might even be better than Darcula on intelliJ :p Since the author is in the comments just wanted to ask one thing. Is this [1] supposed to be misaligned? [1]https://i.imgur.com/aw8ybBz.png https://i.imgur.com/aw8ybBz.png

chrisan 10y ago
My goodness... I've been using postman for a long time and I never noticed themes before. Thank you (or I guess really thank you a85)!

mythz 10y ago

The title of this post should've been: > How we avoided going native, and built an App with Electron instead

tempodox 10y ago

One of those insider-only jokes. Not even their Products page says what it actually is.

a85 10y ago
It does a lot of things. The table should help https://www.getpostman.com/products https://www.getpostman.com/products (essentially everything with API development)

martin-adams 10y ago

I absolutely love the Postman app, well done and thank you! My biggest frustration with native apps are things like the Google login. Without it being in a browser, I have no way to verify that I'm looking at a legitimate login, or a fake one, right through to 2 factor authentication.

a85 10y ago
Thank you for the comment! I think there are ways to represent this better (just with a URL bar for example). Will look into it.
- martin-adams 10y ago
  I'm not sure how easy that is to solve, because again, a rogue app could fake the URL bar. It's just the nature of desktop apps vs the browser as the browser is there the trust is. Maybe passing it to a browser for authentication is the only option. Now I've been using Postman for many years, so I certainly trust the quality and intent of your work.

felipebueno 10y ago

Slightly off-topic: On my current job we use the Postman Chrome app to test out apis. I'm looking for a FOSS command-line alternative to it because it's very slow on my laptop (Linux, Celeron, HDD, 4GB RAM) and the UI makes no sense to me. I know I could just use cURL (which I do) and/or HTTPie but it would be nice to have options. Is there any alternative that would suit my needs?

czardoz 10y ago
We have a CLI for Postman: https://github.com/postmanlabs/newman https://github.com/postmanlabs/newman But it's currently geared towards running collections created in the Postman App (i.e, it's not for one-off requests like cURL is).
- felipebueno 10y ago
  Hey, that looks useful! I'll take a look at it later. Thanks! :) Oh, btw: I read my comment again right now and it sounds a little bit arrogant. I'm sorry about that... By saying it's slow and that I don't like the UI, I mean no offense to you guys. Actually, I think Postman is a very useful tool and my co-workers seem to love it. I's just not for me and my crappy laptop hahah.

cobalt 10y ago

Everyone seems to be commenting on this, but I would consider this to be a standalone app, but not a native app

notsrg 10y ago

Been happily using postman for a couple years now and happily don't care that you called an electron app a native app. Sorry HN is so aggressively pedantic!