Only a tiny thorn in this Paw… Otherwise the Cat’s Meow!!!!

Because Paw costs more than an impulse buy and there is no in-app purchase approach, you have to fish around and find the non-App Store version to try. But it is absolutely worth it. This is the “killer app” for REST API work/exploration. The tiny thorn is no big deal and the short story is that this utility has become a critical part of my dev tool library and a joy to use. As for the tiny thorn, read on if interested. Note the 5 star rating. A rarity as I set a lifetime limit of my age for 5 star ratings.

So you fire up Paw, form your first REST call, you execute it via a “Send Request” button and the button is replaced by output. You quickly become enamored with all the options and the very clean formatting of the output… this thing purrs. Then you realize there is no “Send Request” button when you want to modify the REST parameters a little bit and do it again. Encountering this glaring exception up front makes you wonder how is likely that many more warts exist. And it looks a little like that hotmess called Xcode… so I deleted the app and moved on. (Dec 2015)

Now Feb 2016, reading reviews today and one review mentioned that command-return is used execute the REST call a second time. So, after downloading Paw again from the non-App Store site, and giving it another try with “command return”, the rest of the app becomes very impressive… short of the thorn...

So if “command return” is obvious and the round arrow thingy is obvious, then there is no need for the original “Send Request” button. BUT, if “command return” and the round arrow thingy is not obvious, then the “Send Request” hello-kitty approach might need to be rethought. Perhaps a “Send” next to the URL vs the round arrow thing and be done with it? Now that I know, good to go. But...

Long story short, I almost didn’t buy this and went another direction because of the tiny thorn. That would have been a shame for both the developer and for me as this is the “Cat’s Meow” of REST testing and evaluation. I love the free GraphicalHttpClient and it worked very well with a straight forward interface, but Paw ate it for lunch.

Paw’s operation is superb and has just about everything you ever wanted in an app that you use as a beginner REST explorer to the experienced ObjC / Cocoa developer needing to cut some trial and error out of the software development cycle. While the price is a little high, high enough to make you look around for an alternative, it is not out of reason. There are free tools out there that can give you most of what Paw can do but not all in one place and not all of it.

Over all, looking forward to using this more and replacing a handfull of other tools with Paw. Have not tried the code generators yet but looking forward to that too. What scares me a bit is that you never know when Apple will have a hairball over some feature in an App and reject it from the store and thus your investment in the app goes poof.

Wm. about Paw (HTTP & REST Client)