FW Editor: Hello ! Please tell us something about yourself. How old are you and when did you discover your talent for developing programs? Benjamin: I'm french and I'm 23 years old, still a student in computer science. I think I discovered programming at 16 years old, in college.
FW Editor: What made you develop a program like Snow Leopard NTFS? Why did you feel the need for a program of this kind? Benjamin: When I discovered that Snow Leopard was able to write on NTFS disks, there were no applications to help normal users to do this, so I began to write SL-NTFS.
FW Editor: What makes SL – NTFS a great program in your opinion? What is the feature that you are the most proud of? Benjamin: I think SL-NTFS is nice, because it's really simple to use it.
For me the great feature was to detect an a NTFS drive was plugged and propose the user to enable writing on it without using the Preference Pane.
FW Editor: We know that this program is basically an interface for configuring the NTFS driver from Apple, but can you tell us how it really works? Benjamin: Basically SL-NTFS just write the /etc/fstab file to indicate the OS that writing enabled for this disk.
But the Apple's NTFS driver doesn't officially support NTFS writing, and it seems that on some disks it just didn't work, but unfortunately I can't do anything about it.
FW Editor: Do you plan to add more features in the future for this program? Or you are happy with the way it is right now? Benjamin: No, I don't think I will add other features, I don't have ideas of what to add, and anyway I think it's complete.
I'm currently playing with Lion beta, I'll look to see if the driver is better.
FW Editor: What else can you tell us about your work? Was this the first program you have developed? Any future plans that you want to share with us? Benjamin: Well, currently I'm working for macgeneration.com / igeneration.fr which are the biggest french websites dedicated to the Apple world. I'm doing their iPhone and iPad apps.
In parallel I work on 2 softwares that I'll release in the Mac App Store.
About this interview
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