Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs • Hacker News Board

Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

#111

Post by jacurtis » Tue, Oct 24, 2017, 3:02 PM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #73

mosselman wrote: post #22

I have a Paw license and recently I started using Insomnia instead: https://insomnia.rest/ I find Paw's project management very annoying. It assumes that I am working on some project and wants me to organise everything like that. Fine, lets do it, so where are my projects? They are hidden in some dropdown that you can have fun finding. Insomnia is much cleaner and more to the point.

> insomnia.rest One of those moments where you kick yourself for not being able to come up with these sorts of names.

Haha just visit this page: https://insomnia.rest/download/

> "Download Insomnia so you can finally `GET` some `REST`"

I actually laughed out loud at that one.

Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

#112

Post by h1d » Tue, Oct 24, 2017, 3:06 PM UTC

crispinb wrote: post #74

mosselman wrote: post #22

I have a Paw license and recently I started using Insomnia instead: https://insomnia.rest/ I find Paw's project management very annoying. It assumes that I am working on some project and wants me to organise everything like that. Fine, lets do it, so where are my projects? They are hidden in some dropdown that you can have fun finding. Insomnia is much cleaner and more to the point.

Just checked out Insomnia. From a first run through with a few endpoints it does seem beautifully done. I have been dismissive of electron-based apps in the past. VS.Code started to wear that down - I never took to using it because IntelliJ & emacs cover my bases, but I played with it enough to see its excellence. Now there's Insomnia. Perhaps I need to rethink my attitude to electron apps. I am uncomfortable with th…

And what exactly makes you uncomfortable having 170MB sitting?

OS must be crazy for you.

Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

#113

Post by danpalmer » Tue, Oct 24, 2017, 4:59 PM UTC

oliyoung wrote: post #65

danpalmer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a trial and found the selection for developers wasn't worth the $10. There are a few little utilities, like the Regex tester, that are definitely neat and well made, but given the once a month I actually need that functionality, I'll just use a crappy web app for it. Most of the software I found to be the 3rd best in its category (or worse), for example, It doesn't have OmniFocus or Things, it has a bunch of to…

but OP's point is that a Paw subscription /alone/ is $12/m

Oh apologies. I'd expect that's not a like-for-like comparison. Paw is a paid app, and then has team-sync subscriptions, the former is in SetApp, the latter is not.

Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

#114

Post by pfranz » Tue, Oct 24, 2017, 5:13 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #68

eradicatethots wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Mac users t is a feature, it means 100% dev focus on their platform and tight integration/up to date ness with all Mac features. It’s also obvious a problem, if they have windows users team mates or friends. It’s got pros and cons.

Does that matter without knowing the size of the team? If the team's 10x bigger than you'd have guessed, is it still worse if they're working on Windows & Linux platforms too? FWIW, I do use macOS, I just thought it was an odd 'feature', not least because it makes it unportable and contributes to lock-in.

The people that seek out Mac-only software may have dwindled, but from the mid-90's through the 2000's there was a lot of pride in how Mac software looked and felt way better than other OSes.

When you have cross-platform software, even with a large dev team, there has to be huge compromises. For example, do menus go at the top (macOS) or do you have menus on each window (Windows)? Does Quit go under "File" (Windows) or under the app name's menu (macOS)? If you look at the Google apps on the iPhone, they originally looked like native iPhone apps, but since then Google apps look and work the same between OSes. This makes sense for a branding and development perspective. The few users who switch platforms for whatever reason are pleased, but for people who just use a Mac don't care about other platforms and want all their Mac software to look and work the same. Some people use Safari just because it's a native Mac app. Many people used Camino for that reason, too (Camino was a native Mac browser using Mozilla's Gecko engine developed between 2002-2012, first released a year before Safari).

As an extreme example, personally, I avoid almost all Java apps. Yes, they're cross platform, but they're ugly, slow, and usually integrate poorly with the rest of my system. JetBrains apps are the only exception that come to mind.

Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

#115

Post by pfranz » Tue, Oct 24, 2017, 5:31 PM UTC

neillyons wrote: post #102

For a different approach have a look at PyCharm's new REST client https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2017/09/pycharm-2017-3-ea...

Has anyone used this? How do they like it? It had to be a couple years ago (so it might have been a different iteration), I was testing out some endpoints and figured I'd try PyCharm's new features. I don't have a lot of experience with these tools since it's not a large part of my job, but trying to use it just seemed to frustrate me and slow me down. I went back to curl commands in small shell scripts.

Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

#116

Post by theptip » Tue, Oct 24, 2017, 6:18 PM UTC

gschier wrote: post #47

theptip wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insomnia looks nice, but by default it does not format URLs as links, so in a HATEOAS API you can't follow links. Am I just missing a setting here? Seems like this is a fairly big omission, Postman even supports copying over your headers (e.g. auth token) when you follow a link.

Insomnia founder here. It now does format links but it opens them in your default browser instead of making a new request. That's definitely on the to-do list. Also, if you want it sooner, Insomnia is open source so it's possible to help grow the project. I think the only other app that's open source is Advanced REST Client but it's still a Chrome app (I think).

Thanks for the reply, and for the good work!

Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

#117

Post by sa2ajj » Tue, Oct 24, 2017, 7:27 PM UTC

fredsted wrote: post #82

mosselman wrote: post #22

I have a Paw license and recently I started using Insomnia instead: https://insomnia.rest/ I find Paw's project management very annoying. It assumes that I am working on some project and wants me to organise everything like that. Fine, lets do it, so where are my projects? They are hidden in some dropdown that you can have fun finding. Insomnia is much cleaner and more to the point.

Insomnia doesn't even come close to Paw due to the amount of features Paw has that Insomnia doesn't. Also, Projects are just Paw files. Inside the files you can group and subgroup requests, too. Unless you meant something else?

> Insomnia doesn't even come close to Paw due to the amount of features Paw has that Insomnia doesn't.

Can you list some of the important for you features that Insomnia lacks? (I'm not affiliated w/ Insomnia however I'm curious what makes Paw stand out to you.)

Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

#118

Post by gnlnx » Wed, Oct 25, 2017, 5:01 PM UTC

Is there a way for these tools to work with something like flatbuffers? Ideally, I would import my flatbuffers definitions and the tool would (un)serialize accordingly. I usually end up writing a python script to test APIs but being able to do a lot of that with a nice interface would be useful.

Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

#119

Post by crispinb » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 1:02 AM UTC

h1d wrote: post #112

crispinb wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just checked out Insomnia. From a first run through with a few endpoints it does seem beautifully done. I have been dismissive of electron-based apps in the past. VS.Code started to wear that down - I never took to using it because IntelliJ & emacs cover my bases, but I played with it enough to see its excellence. Now there's Insomnia. Perhaps I need to rethink my attitude to electron apps. I am uncomfortable with th…

And what exactly makes you uncomfortable having 170MB sitting? OS must be crazy for you.

It seems wasteful on space (when I have fancier native apps using much less). I'm not sure it matters that much in practise (though it did recently, before I upgraded my laptop SSD size). But neither am I 100% comfortable with giving comparatively minor apps carte blanche to use as much disk space as they wish.

As I say, I'm unresolved on the matter. Really nice electron apps like Insomnia are prompting a rethink.

Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

#120

Post by kika » Sat, Oct 28, 2017, 7:27 PM UTC

I learned about Paw and decided to try it. My API is based on Swagger (2.0) and Postman is not a very good friend of it. Paw seems to be clean and while UX is kinda sorta sometimes clunky, I see how it could be better than Postman. But, seriously folks, the app crashed twice within half an hour. I just tried to create different environments (I run next dev version locally and also want to run against current published version). Once it failed when I created the environment and once it failed when I added a variable and tried to undo the edit. Very trivial actions and it seems that the app just doesn't receive testing. I'd expect something similar from an OSS app (I'm the tester then and I'm expected to fill bugs). And I'd probably go ahead and fix it or at least try to debug and find the root cause. But for $50 I expect a product. I want to swipe the credit card and move on with my project.