This site is the online companion to my book/DVD, "The Macintosh iLife '05", published by Peachpit Press and Avondale Media. If you like this site, you'll love the book and its nearly three-hour DVD-Video disc. Learn more. Have news, tips, comments, or links? Send them along! How to contact me. Get an iLife. Get your own copy of "The Macintosh iLife '05". Patronize your local bookstore or buy from Amazon for just $23.09 (34 percent off). Learn more about the book and DVD. Find out what all the buzz is about: view samples of this beautiful book and watch QuickTime excerpts from the DVD. Upcoming Appearances June 21. Apple Store, San Francisco, 6 pm June 25. Northeast Ohio Apple Corps, 9 am July 23. iLife seminar, Santa Rosa, CA Photo gallery. I love the Flickr photo sharing service; here are some recent shots. (Newsreader users: To subscribe to my photostream, drag this link into your newsreader.)

iDVD 3.0.1 Follow-Up: Installing on a Mac Without a SuperDrive

After posting yesterday's tip about iDVD 3.0.1 running on Macs without SuperDrives, I received several nearly identical emails: "When I try to install iDVD 3.0 on my Mac, a message appears saying that I don't have a SuperDrive and that I should use the other iLife installer disc."

It's true: If you use the standard iLife installation DVD, you won't be able to install iDVD 3.0 -- and if you don't have 3.0 installed, you can't update to 3.0.1.

What to do?

You can install iDVD 3.0 on a Mac without a SuperDrive, provided that Mac has a DVD drive. You just have to perform a couple of extra steps.

Step 1. Insert your iLife installation DVD in your Mac's DVD drive.

Step 2. Locate the icon named Install. Select it and choose Show Original from the Finder's File menu. A window will appear, and in it will be a folder named Packages.

Step 3. Double click the folder named Packages. A window will open containing five icons, one of them named iDVD.pkg. This is the iDVD 3 installer.

Step 4. Double-click the icon named iDVD.pkg, and install iDVD 3.

Step 5. After the installation is complete, run the iDVD 3.0.1 updater.

I successfully used these steps to install and update iDVD on my PowerBook G4, which has a DVD drive.

iDVD Now Runs on All G4 Macs

Apple quietly introduced an update to iDVD last week. Version 3.0.1 fixes some bugs, and that alone makes it worth installing.

But there's another, hugely significant change in iDVD 3.0.1: the program now runs on any G4 Mac or PowerBook, even if you don't have a DVD burner.

This tidbit is mentioned in an Apple Knowledge Base document, and it's huge. For the first time, you can create an iDVD project on a Mac that doesn't have a SuperDrive. You can't burn your DVD unless you have a SuperDrive, but you can design menus, add movies and photos, and otherwise fine-tune your DVD.

When it comes time to burn, copy the iDVD project file over to a Mac containing an internal SuperDrive. Don't forget to also copy the DVD's assets -- the movie files and so on that you want to be included on the final disc.

This new capability is a boon for schools and businesses that don't have a SuperDrive in every one of their Macs. It's a godsend for me -- I have a PowerBook G4 without a SuperDrive, and now I can demonstrate iDVD at user groups and our iDay digital media seminars, not to mention work on iDVD projects at 30,000 feet.

Get the iDVD 3.0.1 update from Apple's site. (If you don't have iDVD 3, you'll need to buy the $49 iLife package.) And while you're grabbing updates, don't forget to get the free iTunes 4 update to my book: 18 full-color pages covering iTunes 4, the iTunes Music Store, and the new iPods.

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Really old stuff (before February 2003)

©2002-2005 by Jim Heid.