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On macOS there are several closed source tools to deal with asset catalogs: What is the meaning of the CAR extension? It might stand for Compiled Asset Record according to various methods found in the IBFoundation framework in Xcode. The rendition key is in fact a list of attributes describing the properties of the rendition: original facet, resolution, … Each rendition has a unique identifier called the rendition key. The car file can contain multiple images for a given asset name: resolution, resolution, resolution, dark mode, … These representations of the asset are called renditions. MyImage is the Asset Name, also called Facet Name. When the application runs on iOS, getting an image from a car file is as simple as performing: UIImage *myImage = [UIImage this line is executed, the private amework (/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/amework) is asked to give the best UIImage corresponding to the asset named MyImage. When a developer builds an iOS, watchOS, tvOS or macOS app, the asset catalogs containing the various assets (images, icons, textures, …) are not simply copied to the app bundle but they are compiled as car files. This asset catalog has its deployment target set to iOS 12 and contains: The corresponding car file can be downloaded here. This sample asset catalog can be downloaded here. xcassets format on disk is also well described by Apple in the Asset Catalog Format Reference.įor the purpose of this article, I created a simple asset catalog containing various types of assets. xcassets folder and its use is well described by Apple. What are Asset Catalogs?Īsset Catalogs have been introduced in Xcode 5 and make it easier to manage images especially when dealing with multiple resolutions …). It might however become obsolete with future macOS or iOS releases. At the time of publishing, this article should reflect the state in macOS Mojave and iOS 12. Also as always with reverse engineering, there is no guarantee that the data is fully accurate. But these tools simply use some private APIs from Apple and don’t directly parse the files. There are several tools (including my own that I plan to open source at some point) that can dump the content of a car file. You shouldn’t have to directly deal with car files as done here. Note that the documentation in this article and the CARParser tool are purely meant for educational purpose.

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The complete source code of this tool is available for download at the end of the article. Along the article, I build a tool CARParser to manually parse car files. In this article I attempt to remedy this lack of information on the car file format by describing its global structure and its different elements. The car file format is evidently not documented by Apple and surprisingly I could not find much information online. car file when the application is built with Xcode. It is less known that an asset catalog is compiled to a. See the WWDC 2018 session Optimizing App Assets. Xcode 10 added support for High Efficiency Image, Apple Deep Pixel Image Compression, Dark Mode for macOS Mojave.See the WWDC 2017 session What’s New in Cocoa. Xcode 9 added support for Color Asset and improve support for vector assets (PDF).It lets you organize and manage the different assets used by an app, such as images, sprites, textures, ARKit resources, colors and data.Īpple is also extending the asset catalog features each year: An Asset Catalog is an important piece of any iOS, tvOS, watchOS and macOS application.

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