// the take
A macOS app (plus a QuickLook plugin and CLI) for opening compiled .car asset catalog files and theme store files to browse and extract the images inside. It's for iOS/macOS developers and reverse engineers who need to inspect what's bundled in an app's Resources folder, something Apple provides no tooling for.
Solves a real gap — there's no official way to inspect .car files, and this is one of the few tools that does it well. The QuickLook plugin means you get instant previews in Finder without launching the app. Coverage goes beyond basic asset catalogs to ProKit/LunaKit theme stores, which is a niche Apple pro-app format most tools ignore. Ships both a GUI app and a CLI (act), so it's usable in scripts, not just interactively.
Depends on private, undocumented CoreUI/CoreSVG headers (literally in a 'Private Headers' folder) — Apple can break this with any OS update and has no obligation to keep it working. Explicitly doesn't support newer asset catalog features like colors, so it's incomplete for catalogs built with recent Xcode versions. macOS-only by nature of the format, so there's no path to broader use. No test suite visible anywhere in the tree, which is risky for a tool whose core logic parses an undocumented binary format that can change underneath it.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →