Aperture has a very flexible approach to the layout of it's working areas, although there are a couple of bits where it could do with improvement. Even better, almost all of it can be changed with keyboard shortcuts.

My most used layout shortcuts in Aperture are:

V to toggle between Browser pane only, Browser & Viewer Pane & Viewer pane only. Related to this is double-clicking on a thumbnail to open it in Viewer-only mode, and then double-clicking again to go back to seeing the Browser. Note - that last bit can be turned on and off in the Appearance preferences, or can be changed to go into fullscreen mode.

Next we have Shift-W when you are in Browser + Viewer mode - this swaps between having the two panes side-by-side or one on top of the other. Very handy when you are moving between 'regular' images and long horizontal panoramas, or even between landscape and portrait format images.

Related to this is Option/Alt-W which swaps sides if the Browser & Viewer are side-by-side, or top and bottom if one is above the other.

I will hide the Projects/Metadata/Adjustments pane, while Shift-I will swap between having it on the left and right. I almost always have it on the right in the 'default' position, but every so often it's handy to swap around. W will then toggle through the three panes, and Q will take you straight to the Projects pane, even if you've hit I to hide the whole pane.

Option/Alt-F, G & L will toggle the Browser between filmstrip, grid and list views, but I don't seem to swap between them often enough to remember the shortcut, using grid view a good 95% of the time.

F, of course, brings us into fullscreen mode, but since Aperture 2 and the double-click trick I find I hardly ever use it.

A couple more things for freeing up screen space include Shift-F to show/hide the search box and sort order controls in the Browser pane, while D will toggle the control bar at the bottom of the Browser pane. Finally, the little lozenge-shaped button at the top right of the main window will hide the Inspector, Import, New buttons and give you quite a lot more space on a small screen.

Ian