By Graham K. Rogers

This week there were a number of updates to apps that Apple develops, including those that make up iLife and iWork. Some were replaced, but certain of the apps now have old and new versions available to users.

The apps in iLife, particularly iPhoto and iTunes, were simply replaced, although iPhoto has a spiffy new icon (it did in the iOS release too). iWeb and iDVD were not touched and are not expected to be developed further.

iMovie was not replaced. The new version is installed in the Applications folder, and just below is a folder marked iMovie 9.0.9 so if there are problems with projects - as some have reported - the new version of iMovie can export a version of the project in the old format.

There were also changes to the iWork applications which were in a folder in Applications before this update. Now the new versions are installed alongside all the other apps as normal. The older versions of Keynote, Numbers and Pages are still in that folder. This may cause a problem in the Dock for some users.

If the old icons are still in the Dock, then the new versions will not respond if those icons are clicked. For example, the old Keynote icon shows a brown desk and clicking on that opens version 5.3 of the application.

The new Keynote is shown as version 6.0 and has a new blue finish. Unless you want both, drag the old icon out of the Dock and drag the new one in: click on the application in the Finder and drag it to the Dock. This creates the required alias.

As an additional note, some users are reporting problems if the new iWork apps are moved out of the Applications folder. Apple has apparently changed certain of the ways that files are interlinked and it is strongly recommended that these apps are left where they are.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.