Initially developed by Amit Singh, MacFUSE is a plugin which allows you to extend Mac OS X’s file handling capabilities. Freshly out of Google Code, MacFUSE 2.0 brings in a whole lot of features. The update brings with it a dedicated preference pane, full 64-bit support, and several other developer-specific changes that appear to be important enough to be mentioned in their changelog. They’ve even got experimental support for Snow Leopard. 

And if you want to know what goodies await the developers hoping to exploit MacFUSE, Ars has the lowdown on that:

Many of the improvements are for developers creating file system plug-ins. In addition to support for file systems using 64-bit inodes, there are new Xcode project templates to make creating a file system even easier, and added DTrace support to make debugging easier as well. Several new callbacks for the ability to set and read file attributes, backward compatibility, and a couple small bug fixes round out the release. Detailed release notes are also available. – Ars Technica.

Now what exactly is MacFUSE? It is a plugin or architechture upon which you can build other plugins that can allow you to introduce non-native file systems to behave like part of the system. Yes, this allows to you get read/write support for NTFS and EXT3 file systems inside of OS X. Here’s another excellent implementation of MacFUSE which allows you to access iTunes from your Finder sidebar. 

There’s a guide at Download Squad that will help you set up and use MacFUSE to the fullest. Use that while we prepare our own little tutorial on using and exploiting MacFUSE. You can download and install MacFUSE from the Google Code project.