The other day I tried out MacFuse, the user-space filesystem that lets you, for example, mount a remote directory on your Mac via ssh.
I'd known this was theoretically possible for a while, since I recall MJR using sshfs on linux years ago and thinking it would be kinda neat, but not worth recompiling a kernel for. So it was great to just download and run the packaged installer, and five minutes later (after searching the FAQ) discover I could do this:
sshfs username@some.server:/path/to/files /Volumes/servername -oping_diskarb,volname=SomeServer
I guess technically this isn't so amazing - it's been possible to mount remote repositories via WebDAV for some time. But this morning, Adrian pinged to tell me about this awesome demo of MacFuse, which shows how it can be used not just for ssh but also for accessing Spotlight searches, RSS feeds, and even Picassa photo albums. And all through clickable drive icons. Not just accessing remote filesystems, but accessing application data and web services through a filesystem metaphor - absolutely incredible.
This is somewhat reminiscent of the Cocoon Abstract Source interface, now a part of Avalon Excalibur. (here's the history on the Source interface), which lets you access common protocols such as filesystem, HTTP, FTP, or customised protocols such as XMLDB. It's great to see such powerful abstractions reach the desktop.
Right, that's enough procrastination. Time to get back to laying the lounge floor.
Posted by savs at January 20, 2007 12:31 PM