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Going native

blog.getpostman.com

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Re: Going native

#201

Post by a85 »

fn1 wrote: post #153
a85 wrote: post #88

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 thing…

I used PostMan on the Mac for a couple of projects and now I'm thinking thrice before even starting the app. The UI makes no sense to me, but I would need an UX study to find out what's up exactly. I just know . that I keep searching for buttons . that somehow Postman never remembers my state. I have these "tabs" open, close them all, close the app, and when coming back there are tabs open again. When I want to close…

Feel free to email me at help@getpostman.com and we can go through each of these concerns :)

There is a big discussion on tab behavior on our Github tracker. There are different ways and workflows that you can adopt and settings that you can tweak.

On environments: we have autocomplete and inline editing for variables on the way. That should help.

Re: Going native

#202

Post by a85 »

kyberias wrote: post #135
a85 wrote: post #88

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 thing…

I think calling it "standalone app", rather than native would have been more correct. Yeah, go ahead and do exactly that.

Reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=13949208

Re: Going native

#203

Post by a85 »

Animats wrote: post #9

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/

The table on this page should help: https://www.getpostman.com/products

Re: Going native

#205

Post by ashark »

kuschku wrote: post #81
josephg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 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=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 compar…

Java was and is wasteful. Some of us remember something very similar to this Electron mess happening in the Distant Past when Java fans tried to convince everyone that UI slowness and general system-wide performance issues when Java programs were running were just in our heads, and to just get over it because Java was the Way of the Future™.

Of course now computers are so fast that no-one much minds Java anymore. So we had to invent web apps and Electron to make sure desktop computing doesn't actually become pleasant. That'd simply be unacceptable.

Re: Going native

#206

Post by a85 »

Mithaldu wrote: post #176
a85 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure why something would be inherently superior if it is using pre-built OS components. Any software can have memory leaks, buggy behavior, weird input issues etc. I'd rather look at the user experience and qualify something as better/worse after using it. Postman had issues in the beginning when we started porting things over but these were quickly solved and in fact gave us much more power over the experie…

Have a 100% solid reason why: There's already too many of them, and some hardware doesn't like having too many chrome instances running at once. My PC is an i7 with 4 hyper-threaded cores, and an Nvidia Quadro 2000M. I usually have running, as far as electron goes: Chrome, Discord, remote-working app. As soon as i add another electron app to the mix the hardware interrupt activity of my machine goes out of control, p…

We'll investigate if that causes issues with Postman. I haven't faced that problem and I don't think there is a hard limitation on the platform where it can't be optimized. Hardware acceleration is not something that happens continuously - only when things are rendering. More true for games than desktop software perhaps.

Re: Going native

#207

Post by a85 »

wishinghand wrote: post #90
kangoo1707 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All native apps are desktop apps, but not all desktop apps are native apps.

So native would not cover mobile apps?

Re: Going native

#208

Post by a85 »

microtonal wrote: post #145
dopamean wrote: post #97

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?

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. E…

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.

Re: Going native

#209

Post by a85 »

danpalmer wrote: post #189
a85 wrote: post #88

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 thing…

I appreciate that you consider these all to be big advantages, but as a user they fall somewhere between "doesn't matter" and "makes the product worse". The only benefit to your users is the faster time to market, and that's debatable. As a user, I want an application that performs well (which Electron apps typically don't, my main issue with Atom and Slack), and I want an app that fits in well with my platform, whic…

Time to market means the difference between dying and not dying. I built Postman as a solo developer for 18+ months so have seen the extreme end.

Also, platform parity is not easy to achieve. Even within Javascript environments. Other tools like Fiddler, Charles Proxy etc. for example have NEVER been ported natively to another platform for this reason.

Re: Going native

#210

Post by a85 »

sapphire_tomb wrote: post #185
a85 wrote: post #88

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 thing…

Does it support NTLM authentication yet? If not, I still can't make the switch. :(

Highest priority item on the list! :)
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