iMountIt: MacFUSE & ntfs-3g - read/write on NTFS Drives

For a lot of people switching to a Mac after using a PC for years the fact that there is no NTFS write support under OS X is a huge disappointment. Since all my external Hard drives were NTFS formatted I was looking for a possibility to write on NTFS drives under OSX (without the work-around of using Windows under Parallels or vmware). What I stumbled upon is MacFUSE and the ntfs-3g driver:

MacFUSE: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
Ntfs-3g: http://ntfs-3g.org/

First, install the latest MacFUSE release (restart required) then get the ntfs-3g driver (here is a binary package).
On the webpage of Daniel Johnson you will also find the instructions how to mount your NTFS drive with the ntfs-3g driver. Basically it is a couple of terminal codes. After mounting the drive with ntfs-3g drivers your drive will appear with a network icon (apparently this is normal, so no worries).
There used to be a nice package by ShadowOfGed automounting all NTFS drives with the ntfs-3g driver etc. But that package is no longer available (hopefully it will be back by popular demand).
Either way, I was more interested in mounting my drive read/write only when I needed it and not as a default but soon got tired of typing in these terminal codes each time and found something beautiful on the AppleNova forums. This is a AppleScript code for a droplet so you can just drag&drop your drive on it and it automatically remounts it with the ntfs-3g driver. But there were some things I wanted to add/improve and so ended up rewriting parts of it and adding additional features:

iMountIt

So here is my version of the droplet: download (updated:12th Sept 2007)

Credits go out to snert67 from the AppleNova forums for coming up with this ingenious idea and providing his source code!

How to use:
Just extract the zip archive and you’ll end up with “iMountIt.app”. Put this anywhere you want (e.g. the Applications Folder) and put it in your Dock if you wish. You can double-click (or just click if it’s in the dock) and it will list the currently mounted drives. Just select the one you want to remount using the ntfs-3g drivers and click ok. The easier alternative is to just drag&drop the drive on the application.
If you use this application with a non-NTFS drive it will just remount it. If you’re done using the drive with ntfs-3g drivers just drag it on the droplet again and will remount without the ntfs-3g drivers.

Notes:
Strangely it takes about 5sec to unmount the drive. If you manually use the terminal it is way faster. If someone knows why this happens I would appreciate some comments. If you do not have multi-partitioned drives you might want to open the application in the ScriptEditor and edit the part where it unmounts the drive to use the “tell Application Finder…” option instead of the shell command (goes much faster but unmounts all partitions on the same disk).