Rounds out day of iLife, iOS updates

In addition to earlier updates for iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband, Apple has also today issued updates for iWeb and iDVD, the original five parts of its popular iLife suite. The updates for iWeb and iDVD come as a small surprise, as the company did not upgrade the two programs as part of the iLife '11 package and has been seen to be letting them wither on the vine.

As part of the transition to iCloud coming this fall, iWeb will eventually be unable to publish websites toMobileMe, though the program will continue to work for uploading sites to other hosting servers. Apple's commitment to iWeb is unclear, having cut one of the main anchors for the program, though iWeb continues to have fans in the casual-user space based on its strong ease-of-use for basic, personal- and educationally-oriented websites.

The iWeb update weighs in at 178.57MB and says simply that the update "addresses a number of minor issues" and improves overall stability, and is recommended for all iWeb 3.x users. It's available through Software Update or Apple's support website.

The iDVD update is also recommended for all iDVD 7 (iLife 09) users, but in addition to the usual stability and bug-fix issues, it includes improvements to the reliability of importing iPhoto '11 slideshows, fixes a problem that prevents files from re-linking once unlinked, and addresses an issue where iDVD may use 100 percent of available CPU capacity when doing a search for unlinked or missing files. It is 36.12MB in size and also available either via Software Update or Apple's support website.

The iDVD program has languished since before 2009, and although it was generally lauded as an option for easily turning iMovie projects into playable "movie" DVDs, the process remained somewhat difficult, bug-prone and (more importantly) very slow for consumers, frustrating some users even while Apple had started to make sharing iMovie projects on public video websites like YouTube more integrated into iMovie as an alternative.

Alternatives such as Roxio's Toast have largely caught up with -- and in some areas, surpassed -- iDVD's abilities, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs has indicated that he doesn't foresee Apple supporting Blu-Ray outside the video professional market, leaving the company to offer 720p HD movies and videos as streaming downloads through iTunes, with some experimentation with offering 1080p movies alongside a possible AppleTV update.

by MacNN Staff