Apple released updates to five of the six applications that make up the iLife '06 suite last week, providing bug fixes and minor enhancements for iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, iWeb, and iTunes. Details remain scarce, but Apple claims that iPhoto 6.0.1 (a 13.7 MB download) fixes bugs related to photocasting; viewing thumbnails in large libraries; and ordering cards, calendars, and books. iMovie HD 6.0.1 (52.6 MB) resolves problems with the rendering performance of the Ken Burns Effect, editing performance with the Scrubber Bar, and image quality in iMovie's themes. iDVD 6.0.1 (5.3 MB) fixes integration troubles with other iLife applications, importing of legacy projects, and some theme-related issues. iWeb 1.0.1 (19.1 MB) addresses issues related to publishing and blogs. Lastly, iTunes 6.0.3 (18.7 MB) contains stability and performance improvements over the previous version. All of the updates reportedly fixed "a number of other minor issues" as well, and I suspect that those bug fixes may in fact be the most welcome.

<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ iphoto601.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ imoviehd601.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ idvd601.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ iweb101.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ itunes603.html>

When I first tried to run these updates, a dialog kept popping up, telling me to quit iWeb before installing the update. The only problem was that iWeb was not running, and launching and quitting it again made no difference. Restarting my Mac and running Software Update again did solve the problem, but the only reason it worked is that OmniWeb wasn't running when I tried the update the second time. I should have remembered instantly, since I'd seen this problem some months ago when trying to update iTunes: if there is any running application whose process name contains the name of an iLife application, the updater will fail in this manner, since Apple's code isn't very smart about checking names. So, in the case of iWeb, notice that "OmniWeb" contains "iWeb" and in the case of iTunes, my problem was caused by the SizzlingKeys preference pane (which lets you control iTunes from the keyboard in any application), since its process name is "SizzlingKeys4iTunes". To determine what application might be causing the problem, launch Activity Monitor, select All Processes from the Show pop-up menu, and in the Filter field, type "iWeb". If you're comfortable at the command line, type the following line into Terminal:

ps -aux | grep iWeb

Either way, if your search finds anything, quit the offending application and run the update again.

<http://yellowmug.com/sk4it/>