Technology and innovations with zest

MacFUSE, released by Google in January 2007, is a technology that Mac users have been awaiting for years — without realising it!

MacFUSE, and related technologies, are distinguished by the novel and simplified ways in which data/information is presented to the end user. In and around the MacFUSE and MacFusion projects: talented developers are making exemplary use of open source technologies. In unexpected ways, Desktop, Finder™ and Mac OS® become more usable.

In my spare time — beyond the Centre for Research in Innovation Management (CENTRIM) and Freeman Centre — I help to organise the open source MacFusion Project:

• MacFusion home page
• relevant links and selected coverage
• announcement to Plone/web developers

The architecture of MacFusion, and the outstanding MacFUSE foundation provided by Amit Singh and colleagues at Google Code, provide a framework within which developers of plug-ins can focus on what they know best — complex technologies. MacFusion, a prominent and easy-to-understand bundling of the communities’ contributions, helps to make things blindingly simple, sometimes transparent, for the end user.

MacFusion 1.0 was released in April 2007 with two popular plug-ins — for CurlFtpFS (FTP) and SSHFS (SSH/SFTP). Five weeks later, MacFusion 1.1 democratically rose to the hotlist at user-centric site i use this…

On 26th May a third plug-in, for an encrypted file system — EncFS.plugin, was made available to developers. I foresee encryption-oriented plug-ins becoming a fine complement to, or alternative to, FileVault® in Mac OS X. (Why suffer the performance hits that are occasionally associated with encrypting your entire home directory, if you can ease things for yourself by encrypting only those files that are confidential or sensitive?)

A Google search yields around 150,000 results; early indications are that the buzz around MacFUSE and MacFusion will attract quality developers and innovative thinkers from far and wide.

I have used and advocated open source for years, but these are my first significant contributions (of time and thought) to an open source project. It’s a great pleasure to be involved and to see, use and share the end results!

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