Apple

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. ...