Aperture is built from the ground up for photographers, not computer technicians. As such, Apple has gone a long way to make it easy to understand and non-threatening. Even first-time users should be up and running in minutes, and will be pleasantly surprised by the amount of hand-holding on offer, making Aperture's workflow a more intuitive, productive one than that offered by Photoshop.

The Aperture Welcome screen offers five options for first-time users, the three most important of which go straight to importing photos into your newly created Library from either your camera or another location on your Mac's hard drive (Fig. 2.36).

Figure 2.36: The Aperture splash screen gives you an easy way in to the application's most common starting points. When you get more familiar with the program, however, it will probably be disabled

Mac OS X's Unified Media Browser lets you use any photo managed by an Apple application -iPhoto or Aperture-in any compatible application, so you can view your Libraries in office tools like Keynote and Pages, or use them as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. By providing third-party developers with hooks into this system, Apple also allows these Libraries to appear in applications developed externally, such as RapidWeaver, so it's no surprise that Aperture and iPhoto can also happily exchange assets between themselves. As described elsewhere (see p. 286), this lets you use your photos to create products that are not available to each application, using iPhoto assets in...