iPhone .png Decoding
Anyone who has delved into the internals of the iPhone’s OS probably knows that, for whatever reason, .png files on the iPhone are encoded in a manner that makes them unreadable by normal image editing programs. There is a tool out there to handle the simple conversion, but this tool is a two-step process, only handles one file at a time, and doesn’t come precompiled. I took a few minutes the other day to produce an modified version (precompiled universal binary and source code included) that recursively handles foldered content and perform all necessary conversions in one step.
The usage is straightforward. In the Terminal, type “./iPhonePNG <input>” where <input> is either a single .png file or a folder. If you’re providing a folder, iPhonePNG will first create a full copy at the path <input>-Decoded, and then proceed to convert every .png file in the folder, leaving you with a folder with all original non-image content preserved and all .png resources decoded into a readable format.
This certainly isn’t something that will be useful to many people, but I wanted the tool for internal purposes and since it doesn’t cost anything to release, I might as well make the modifications public.
Thanks David!