MacOS Posts

This article is about how and why the Nextcloud file provider extension for macOS learns about changes on servers without Apple’s centralized push notification service.

When attaching Xcode to the file provider extension process of the Nextcloud desktop client, the debugger connected just fine — but every single breakpoint was displayed hollow and in dashes which means Xcode cannot associate the position with a line of code on disk. Tracking down the root cause turned into quite the adventure.

A question I encounter regularly from users is why the Nextcloud Desktop Client is so large. After all, it’s “just” a file synchronization app, right? Let me explain what’s actually inside that 945 MB application bundle by inspecting the 4.0.6 release with file provider extension for macOS.

If you’re shipping apps for both iOS and macOS, you’ve probably noticed that registering bundle identifiers with your developer team is necessary for iOS only.

No big thing worth mentioning for me - except one.

Small but useful improvements in the name of convergence. Nothing amazing, though.

Some SwiftUI views I have require padding one platform and none on the other. To avoid preprocessor switches everywhere I created a custom view modifier for it.

Apparently, the feature set of fileproviderctl has been narrowed down to the dismay of developers, testers and even administrators and it appears to be intentional.

macOS 13.6 Ventura shipped a fileproviderctl binary with broken signing which rendered it useless and us unable to properly clean up the environment.