Insomnia Designer: Collaborative API Design

by Taylor Slattery | July 23, 2020

Despite the internet providing an open line for constant connection, many industries still face hurdles in collaboration. Whether due to tools or redundancies in the workflow, there is no doubt room for improvement. Recently, we’ve seen a number of new design applications arise to address the bloating of their predecessors. Rather than try to do it all, they niche down and trim the fat. The result is a greatly simplified design process and headache-free user experience.

Insomnia API Designer is an open-source desktop application for designing and editing API documents. Insomnia already has a great reputation as a tool for interacting with APIs like REST and GraphQL, but has now branched out into API design. To keep things simple and clean within Insomnia Core, their most popular tool, they’ve built a separate app geared solely toward design. Using the same features from Insomnia Core that users are already familiar with, they’ve developed a similar interface that allows users to collaboratively work on OpenAPI documents.

The aim of this project is collaboration. Insomnia designed their new app with the frustrations of companies in mind. The new Designer app is intended to approve upon the API design workflow by providing users with a single location to both design and edit within. To ensure that all members of the team are kept in the loop, Designer is cross-platform. It’s available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, so regardless of your setup, you can stay connected with the team. It also has Git integration, so any changes and updates can be quickly shared with everyone.

Designer is open-source and users are encouraged to join the community on Slack or submit feedback via the GitHub page. This is just the first release. While Designer already sports robust functionality, there is always room for improvement. Community feedback can play a large role in the direction future updates take, so if you enjoy the application, be sure to contribute your feedback. If you would like to try it out for yourself, you can find the download page here.