MacFUSE is a native file system for Mac OS X—”native” means that it lives in the kernel, like HFS+ and AFP. However, MacFUSE doesn’t ultimately provide the file system content itself—it communicates with a standard Mac OS X application to read or write the actual file system content. Thus, MacFUSE is a file system that lets you write file systems. To do so, a developer would use one of the APIs provided by MacFUSE. MacFUSE 2.0 provides multiple APIs including, but not limited to, the FUSE API from Linux.

A new version of MacFUSE is now available. As always, you can download a ready-to-install prebuilt package, or browse the ready-to-build source. Besides bug fixes and other minor improvements, there is a major new developer feature in this release: an Objective-C framework is now part of the core MacFUSE distribution! MacFUSE.framework will make developing user-space file systems in Objective-C easier than ever before. We look forward to seeing lots of interesting new applications based on MacFUSE.

Ted Bonkenburg, one of the engineers behind MacFUSE.framework, will give a talk this Thursday, January 10, during the next Silicon Valley Cocoaheads meeting at the Apple campus in Cupertino. His talk will focus on using the MacFUSE Objective-C API, but much of it will carry over to using other programming languages with MacFUSE. We’ll also show some very cool file system demos. So, if you’re interested in MacFUSE and are in the area, be there! It will be a hands-on talk, so please bring your laptops if you want to follow along. (Xcode 2.5 or newer required.)

File systems provide one of the most familiar interfaces end users know. Since implementing a traditional file system is extremely complex and difficult, presenting information seamlessly through files and folders has typically been limited to a small set of select programmers—often kernel hackers who develop at the lowest layers of a system.

The MacFUSE mechanism breaks this barrier on Mac OS X by doing all the in-kernel hard work once and for all and leaving to the developer only the file-system-specific logic, which can be implemented as a regular user-space application. MacFUSE, with its simple programmer-visible API (same as the Linux FUSE API) and multiple language bindings, almost trivializes the process of making anything and everything appear seamlessly as a set of files and folders. You can also use it to blur the line between the Macintosh Desktop and the Web.

In this talk, you will hear the story of MacFUSE from yours truly.