This week on our journey to make APIs simple and intuitive, we shipped features related to personalization and faster API testing in HTTPie for Web & Desktop, and worked on propagating and polishing rough edges around HTTPie for Terminal 3.0.
Check out what’s new 👇
HTTPie for Web & Desktop
HTTPie for Web & Desktop continues in the tradition of HTTPie for Terminal and comes equipped with a thoughtful set of defaults reflecting the needs of most users and most of their use cases.
However, when it comes to a product as use case-rich as an API development platform, stopping at the defaults level doesn’t provide enough flexibility. Some means of customization are necessary.
We treasure both simplicity and flexibility. Balancing these two opposing forces is a delicate process, though, and we’ll always strive to maintain the equilibrium.
⚙️ New settings tab
To provide more flexibility, settings now have their dedicated tab. You can open it from the menu under your avatar. For now, you can change your interface (light/system/dark theme) and request (redirects) preferences there. We’ll be conservatively adding more over time.
⏭ Automatically follow redirects
Auto redirects have been a frequent request from our beta users. It is also the more common behavior in graphical HTTP clients (from browsers to API testing tools). Now we have adopted them as well: when you make a request to http://httpie.io/hello, for example, HTTPie for Web & Desktop will now follow the redirect to https://httpie.io/hello.
Suppose that’s not something you want and prefer the default no-follow behavior from HTTPie for Terminal instead, no worries. Go to your settings and disable this option. This new setting made the change of the default redirection behavior possible without breaking anyone’s API workflow.
✨ Improvements
- Similarly to the recent speed-ups in HTTPie for Terminal 3.0, we continue to improve the performance of the Web & Desktop app as well. This time, we focused on making the processing of large responses many times festers.
- We’re now also smarter about detecting network issues in the Web app that the Desktop one wouldn’t run into (for example, DNS errors possibly related to private networks). We’ll offer you to switch to desktop whenever we detect a situation like that.
🪲 Fixes
- This week we also shipped a bunch of small fixes. For example, the body and auth type selectors opened by default now close when you click anywhere on the screen, so they no longer trap the focus and keyboard navigation.
HTTPie for Terminal
Last week we were thrilled to announce the availability of the 3.0 release of HTTPie for Terminal. This week we continued polishing some rough edges, shipped 3.0.2 fixing a bug in the new plugin manager, and worked on propagating the release to different channels. Don’t miss it!
Happy API testing, and see you next week!
But in the meantime…
- 💁🏻♀️ Join the private beta of HTTPie for Web & Desktop, if you haven’t yet.
- 👉 Join our Discord community and follow @httpie to stay up-to-date.
- 👩💻 We’re looking for new colleagues in engineering and design roles.
