News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

January 18, 2007

geekery

Fuse with me

Posted Jan. 18, ’07, 7:49 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Geekery

FUSE MacFUSE is the new hotness from Google’s Mac genius, Amit Singh. It allows developers to quickly implement their own filesystems into Mac OS X. FUSE itself is a cross platform software package. The most exciting plugins for most Mac users are the sshfs and ntfs. Imagine being able to treat SSH connections as a disk or even opening NTFS disks with read write access.

While both of those are extremely useful, that’s only the beginning. In a video, Amit demonstrates other exciting possibilities such as ProcFS (process filesystem, which lets you get information about processes just by navigating a file hierarchy), rssfs (for browsing RSS feeds), SpotlightFS (instantly perform Spotlight queries simply by inputing your query as a directory), DocsFS (for browsing your Google documents and speadsheets), and even PicasaFS (for browsing and manipulating your Picaca Web albums).

The possibilities are endless. It’s not yet a finished product, but considering Amit’s chops with the OS, I’m thinking he’s done it right. It does use a kernel extension however, so play with it at your own risk.


Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: