Mac app comes out of beta with 4.0 release
Native app, Environment Sharing, Faster Performance
On December 18th, we released our first version of a Postman Mac app in beta. Since then, we’ve received and incorporated valuable feedback from 19,000+ users who tried us early. The one thing we heard loud and clear was people were ecstatic to have an alternative to Chrome. Today, after changes to incorporate the feedback, we are coming out of beta with Postman for Mac 4.0. Welcome to a native, slicker and more performant experience.
In the spirit of all things Apple, we wanted the user experience to be amazing. So a big focus coming out of beta has been to improve the design and functionality. A native app enables that. The app contains all the state of the art features you love, such as the testing suite, request chaining, and team collaboration, and then some. We have spent considerable time making your experience using these features better.
One of the ways we’ve achieved this is by overhauling the app’s view layer using React. The result is a snappier and smoother experience. And that’s not all. We have improved the user experience around every button and every flow that you use. This is just the beginning though. We are working on several improvements that you’ll see in the coming weeks with this new design.
Along with design improvements, the app comes with new functionality for our Cloud users as well. One of the consistent pieces of feedback we received is that people want to share environments. Environments give you the ability to customize requests using variables. You can use them to easily switch between different setups without changing your requests.
As you can imagine, a combination of sharable collections and environments will speed up a team working on APIs considerably. However, we had to maintain a balance between shareability and privacy. We have implemented this using environment templates. Environments can contain sensitive data and you wouldn’t want to share them with the rest of your team. However, using environment templates you can hide sensitive values while retaining the keys for environment variables. So Cloud team leads can heave a sigh of relief.
The new Mac app packages useful functionality and a slick new design in a high performant native experience. For more details on what to expect in the Mac app as opposed to Chrome, check out our blog post from the beta release. To check out all these improvements we’ve been talking about, download the Mac app.
That sounds nice. I am not a Mac user, but I think it is good for your tool to make it available as native app too. Are you using some special cross platform technique? The UI looks pretty consistent to the Chrome app according to the Screenshots (that is why I assume you share it somehow).
You will start to see more cross platform apps using GitHubs Electron wrapper. It provides a native cross platform framework while displaying web UI inside the frame, giving a modern day hybrid native/web app. There are several apps, like Slack, and Kitematic (Docker) that are using the same approach. My preference which is what Postman is using is a ReactJS UI layer. I believe Electron is working on a mobile version as well, not entirely sure though, but being able to build an application UI in ReactJS that can now also be rendered in native desktop apps and mobile apps is a huge leap forward.. one UI, multiple platforms, win win.
Thank you fro your comprehensive response. Just read about it: “The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on Node.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.” So Chromium and Node.js that is interesting. Your app as windows application: Would be awesome.
Phenomenal rollout. The app looks incredible, is definitely much more responsive, and has a fantastic future ahead with this redesign! Congrats to the entire team. Postman is now synonymous with rest client… like google for search! I don’t know many people that haven’t heard of or are not using Postman today!