MacFUSE allows you to extend Mac OS X's native file handling capabilities via 3rd-party file systems. It is used as a software building block by dozens of products.
As a user, installing the MacFUSE software package will let you use any 3rd-party file system written atop MacFUSE.
As a developer, you can use the MacFUSE SDK to write numerous types of new file systems as regular user-mode programs. The content of these file systems can come from anywhere: from the local disk, from across the network, from memory, or any other combination of sources. Writing a file system using MacFUSE is orders of magnitude easier and quicker than the traditional approach of writing in-kernel file systems. Since MacFUSE file systems are regular applications (as opposed to kernel extensions), you have just as much flexibility and choice in programming tools, debuggers, and libraries as you have if you were developing standard Mac OS X applications.
MacFUSE 2.0
* Feature: MacFUSE Preference Pane. Makes it easy and straightforward to keep Up-to-date with MacFUSE releases, with the user in full control.
* Feature: 64-Bit Support. The entire MacFUSE software Stack: the kernel extension, the MacFUSE user-space C library, and the Objective-C framework now also come in 64-bit Versions. You must be running Leopard or above for this. Naturally, you also need 64-bit hardware to make use of these capabilities. [Experimental]
* Feature: Support for Snow Leopard. You can now install and use MacFUSE on the latest Snow Leopard developer seed. [Highly Experimental]
* Feature: Enhanced DTrace support. MacFUSE.framework now contains USDT probes that will be helpful to those developing file systems in Objective-C. For example, look at the updated LoopbackFS example file system: the logging code from it has been removed because better tracing information can be had using DTrace. Consequently, the file system code is shorter and easier to read.
* Etc.
