Writing and testing API queries is a growing part of my job and Postman has long been an important part of my toolkit. However, it sometimes feels too heavy and its 45-second loading time is more than annoying.

When I came across NativeREST on AppSumo, what caught my attention was the claim that it was fast, light on resources and native for Windows. At the same time, it apepared not to sacrifice any of the fundamental capabilities I require; it was a simple decision to give it a go.

My first impression, after spending more than an hour with the tool was that it definitely showed promise. The app would load in less than 3 seconds, and it had all the functionality I would expect from a lightweight alternative to Postman. But also, some really basic features like keyboard shortcuts or automated bracket closing were missing or problematic, and there was at least one bug that lead to overwriting data when creating workspaces. This prompted me to say in my first review that the product was not production ready in that state.

However I was very pleased to receive quick response from the developer (@uhaleks) and it was even nicer to see how quickly he fixed the issues I initially discovered, plus a couple smaller ones that popped up along the way. He even found the time to add a new feature at my request.

As of the time of posting this, in my opinion NativeREST is in much better shape and, more importantly, I am confident that the developer is active and invested in the product in the long run.

This is all I need to update my score to a well-deserved 5-taco rating that reflects both its present state and future perspective.