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This used to be easier, but changes in new versions of iOS and macOS have meant that methods such as copying the image via iMessage no longer work. You’ll need a Mac and an iPhone/iPad with iCloud notes and Continuity enabled. On your iPhone, open the Notes app and create a new note. Tap the Markup button in the bottom toolbar (looks like a pencil ✏️). Tap the + button on the trailing edge of the toolbar. Tap “Add Sticker”. Select the sticker you’d like a PNG of. It will show up in your note, allowing you to move it around, and presenting a hovering toolbar. Tap the 3 dots button. Tap copy. Your Mac will begin reflecting the iOS clipboard. Open Finder on your Mac and paste the clipboard contents into a folder. Enter the newly-created folder. Right click the Assets.bundle folder and select “Show Package Contents”. Right click the file within the assets bundle and rename it, adding “.png” to its name. Confirm you want to change the file’s extension. Open it in Preview and export it to PNG to fix the metadata. Voila! ...

Introduction If you’ve used iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, or any other major file syncing service on macOS, you will have noticed that files only get downloaded as you interact with them. These services use Apple’s FileProvider API to achieve this. The FileProvider API gives developers a number of tools to present files to users via a special filesystem through Finder. It in effect replaces a bunch of older solutions for on-demand file sync with a simple API that is developed by Apple and fit for use on macOS, iOS, and derivatives. It makes it pretty easy to develop your own on-demand sync client, provides a nice user experience that integrates well with the OS, and is cross-platform. Unfortunately, the documentation is a bit sparse, so this post will go over some of the basics. ...

Working on the Nextcloud desktop client, I stumbled into a nasty little bug. If you tried to add or remove a user account, the app would often freeze for a while. This was super annoying during testing, so I decided to look into it. Surprisingly this wasn’t a new bug I’d unwittingly introduced; tracing the source of the freeze led all the way down into QtKeychain, which is what the desktop client uses to store user credentials. ...

KDE PIM is the set of applications that helps you manage your email, contacts, appointments, tasks and more. Since our last report covering KDE PIM in May and June, the PIM applications and libraries have seen over 1200 changes from almost 30 contributors. Let’s go over some of the biggest updates. New features Kalendar I have been working on improvements to the calendar side of Kalendar. New changes include the addition of new and improved differentiation between all-day and not all-day events in the month view. This change makes the month view look quite different — in a good way! ...

VLC macOS Interface Redesign For the past few months I’ve been working on VLC’s native macOS interface, which has been undergoing a major overhaul in preparation for its next major release. The aim has been to improve the user experience of the media player and to push development forward in anticipation of version 4.0. Some background VLC has separate GUIs on Windows/Linux vs macOS. On the former two platforms, everything is built using Qt. This makes it relatively easy to code a graphical application once and have it work well on a multitude of platforms. ...

You might have noticed that there have been a lot of KDE releases this week, like Plasma 5.24 and Plasma Mobile Gear. Keen to hop onto this train, those of us in the Kalendar team are happy to reveal Kalendar version 1.0. We are even happier to announce that this will be the final version of Kalendar before we will hopefully become part of KDE Gear, where Kalendar will join the rest of the KDE Application family in a 4 month release schedule, with bug fix releases in between. ...

I know it has been a while since our last update, but I can assure you that we have not been twiddling our thumbs! For the holiday season, we are happy to bring a new release of Kalendar, which we have worked hard on to bring new features, better performance, and a bunch of bugfixes that should make Kalendar better than ever on those of you with shiny new machines. This release should land over the newt couple of days. ...

Over the past two weeks, we have been hard at work under the hood of Kalendar. What you can expect from these two weeks’ refactors, additions, and changes is a version of Kalendar that is more stable, faster to use, and easier to use than ever before. Note: Kalendar is still under heavy development. You’re free to poke around and try it out, but it is not yet final software! If you want to contribute to its development, join us in Kalendar’s Matrix room. ...

A week has passed since our first release and we are back with another one! We’ve worked hard to go through your bug reports and suggestions, and thanks to these we have a new version of Kalendar that is more stable and powerful than ever. Note: Kalendar is still under heavy development. You’re free to poke around and try it out, but it is not yet final software! If you want to contribute to its development, join us in Kalendar’s Matrix room. ...

That’s right! Kalendar is now on version 0.1, and we have a first release. There’s still a lot we have left to work on before we get to 1.0, but we are getting there! More on this below. We also have a truly titanic changelog for the past two weeks. Some truly big changes and a load of smaller ones make Kalendar better than ever and should mean a beta that is a significant improvement upon our previously unstable builds. ...