This is great, except that I can not stop the media keys on my aluminum keyboard (rewind, play, fast forward) from controlling the slideshow instead of controlling iTunes as they were designed. Frustration.

The problem is that say I'm listening to iTunes while working on my photos. A call comes in, and I press the play/pause key on my keyboard. Unfortunately, the music continues to play, AND a slideshow starts up. What a mess.

I understand that some might want to control the slideshow using these keys, and that's great. All I'm asking for is the ability to stop this behavior, but unfortunately, Apple has decided that I do not need the choice. Wonderful.

I tend to shy away from keyboard shortcut modifications, for four reasons.

1. Most importantly, I do wipes and reinstalls fairly often, and most apps make customizing keyboard shortcuts a major pain to do every time. I hadn't realized Aperture offers exporting/importing of commands, which makes this whole reason go away (for Aperture). I will just need to make sure the command set, once configured, gets backed up with everything else.

2. Often books and other resources (ie, the web) will refer to a command by its default command key. For instance, they'll say "then hit 'a' to exit the crop" or similar. If I've moved keys around, it makes trying out other peoples' hints a little harder.

3. Somewhat of an extension of above, *I* often refer to a command based on its key. It's a major pain to always have to second-guess myself when I do this ("then hit the 'a' key ... er, at least, that's what I have my keyboard set to ...")

4. Finally, I'm reticent to commit to a new keyboard layout based on my workflow today when I'm not positive that workflow will be the one I use tomorrow. I might not use the Doomaflitchey-Upcase command right now, but if it's bound to the space bar by the application designer that probably means they see it as a key command and it's pretty likely I'll want to use it more once I know how the app works a bit better.

Altogether, Aperture seems to make these go away much more than the average app, allowing importing and exporting of command sets, and the ability to move back to the default quickly and easily. Still, I've been bitten by the above too often to just overnight change :)

This functionality is great for those of us who have non-US keyboards - with Aperture 1.5 my Swedish layout always missed out on the ability to have a single key assigned to the loupe, whereas with version 2 I can assign the loupe to a redundant key. The ability to have custom keyboard layouts was something that I mailed Apple about in sheer frustration - and they listened!

I am a huge shortcut user. I love flipping between different applications, performing commands and adjustments, opening applications not in my dock - all without leaving my keyboard and using either an inefficient mouse or an even more inefficient trackpad.

As a heavy Final Cut Pro user, I was happy to see this keyboard customizing feature show up in Aperture. This really helps as a teaching tool if you ever ask yourself, "I wonder if there's a faster way to do [blank]". I'm not big on heavy modification, mainly due to the fact I'm not always using my computer, but I usually use it to turn off annoying accidental keystrokes, as mentioned above.

The ability to change the keyboard layout, and the popular interest in doing so, makes it hard for me to find the printed keyboard covers very useful. They usually are $50 (for a piece of latex!). What's worse, is even if you were considering customizing your keyboard, perhaps the cost of the cover would put you off changing the layout, resulting in a trap of snubbed potential. Well, I might be overstating it a little bit there, but you get the point. ; )

Thanks for the post!

Here's a megadittos to the aluminum keyboard user. It drives me nuts that I can't use those keys, especially when you're working in full-screen mode.

My solution was to have the iTunes widget running in Dashboard, and remember to use that to quickly pause iTunes without having to leave full screen. That being said, I much prefer to be able to push a button, or command-tab back to itunes ad hit the space bar.

On the subject of using dashboard while in fullscreen, here's an idea that I hope someone knows a readymade solution for: I have a NEC LCD2690WUXi that is able to physically rotate 90 for portraits shots. The included software/firmware is supposed to rotate the screen automatically when I grab hold of the bezel and turn it. This works fine for windows users, but not for my Mac. When I want to show a client a portrait image at the big scale, I have to leave full-screen, go to SysPefs, and click on the pull-down menu to rotate the screen, adding time and hassle to what is otherwise a fast, impressive viewing session.

Is there a widget out there that lets me just click a button to rotate the screen? This would save me 10-15 seconds every time I have to switch back and forth, and would make working less of a pain to.