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I really like building developer tools and kind of miss doing it full time. I built a tool for testing/playing with REST services last year and sell it on the O

by suresk 14y ago

I really like building developer tools and kind of miss doing it full time. I built a tool for testing/playing with REST services last year and sell it on the OS X app store: http://www.uresk.net/httpclient/ http://www.uresk.net/httpclient/ I'm not getting rich off it, but it usually brings in a few hundred bucks per month and I like hearing from fellow developers who benefit from using it.

krickle 14y ago
Did you do any market testing to see if there was a need, or was this scratching your own itch?
- suresk 14y ago
  It was just something I needed at the time - I was doing a lot with REST services at the time and thought a simple tool for interacting with them would be handy.
nja 14y ago
That's pretty cool, actually. I would never have thought of selling an app for that, as most everybody I know uses Advanced REST Client ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-client-appl/hgmloofddffdnphfgcellkdfbfbjeloo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-clie... ). It must be really neat to know people are choosing to pay you for your product over using a similar free app.
- suresk 14y ago
  Thanks. The browser-based ones have improved quite a bit recently. I use Advanced REST Client whenever I'm on a Windows machine - it is quite good. There are a few features that my tool has that make it worth a few bucks for some people, I think, most notably being able to save requests and share them with other members of your team. I've heard from a few folks who have them checked into source control as part of manual testing scripts (there are some interesting opportunities to automate this kind of testing, too, but I haven't had time to focus on it). And I'm releasing a feature soon that will let you paste in cURL commands and turn them into requests, which is handy when you're working with a webservice that has examples of requests given in the form of cURL commands (which is a lot of them). Even if you're competing against free apps that match and even exceed what you can offer in some areas (which is frankly going to be more and more common), you can still find little features that might be fairly simple but add a ton of value for a certain subset of people.
gsibble 14y ago
I use this! Great work!
robertfall 14y ago
This is still my go to tool for GUI request crafting. Thanks!
ExcitedByNoise 14y ago
I use this tool as well. Comes in handy. Any chance I can put in a feature request to reduce the minimum window size? About 960*600 would be perfect.
- suresk 14y ago
  Glad to hear it is useful to you. I'll look into making the minimum window size smaller for the next release - thanks for the feedback.

by suresk 14y ago

krickle 14y ago

Did you do any market testing to see if there was a need, or was this scratching your own itch?

suresk 14y ago
It was just something I needed at the time - I was doing a lot with REST services at the time and thought a simple tool for interacting with them would be handy.

nja 14y ago

That's pretty cool, actually. I would never have thought of selling an app for that, as most everybody I know uses Advanced REST Client ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-client-appl/hgmloofddffdnphfgcellkdfbfbjeloo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-clie... ). It must be really neat to know people are choosing to pay you for your product over using a similar free app.

suresk 14y ago
Thanks. The browser-based ones have improved quite a bit recently. I use Advanced REST Client whenever I'm on a Windows machine - it is quite good. There are a few features that my tool has that make it worth a few bucks for some people, I think, most notably being able to save requests and share them with other members of your team. I've heard from a few folks who have them checked into source control as part of manual testing scripts (there are some interesting opportunities to automate this kind of testing, too, but I haven't had time to focus on it). And I'm releasing a feature soon that will let you paste in cURL commands and turn them into requests, which is handy when you're working with a webservice that has examples of requests given in the form of cURL commands (which is a lot of them). Even if you're competing against free apps that match and even exceed what you can offer in some areas (which is frankly going to be more and more common), you can still find little features that might be fairly simple but add a ton of value for a certain subset of people.

gsibble 14y ago

I use this! Great work!

robertfall 14y ago

This is still my go to tool for GUI request crafting. Thanks!

ExcitedByNoise 14y ago

I use this tool as well. Comes in handy. Any chance I can put in a feature request to reduce the minimum window size? About 960*600 would be perfect.

suresk 14y ago
Glad to hear it is useful to you. I'll look into making the minimum window size smaller for the next release - thanks for the feedback.