it turns out you can drive many of adobe's apps via a swfPanel in AI – with one catch – if you're using apple's latest OS leopard, you're out of luck (at least for now). what really gets me excited, though, is the fact that you can pick and choose features and functions from each app and combine them into your own custom über apps.

in this example, i needed to download ~16,000 images for this poster contest in order to generate ~1,000 posters. that included the need to position, scale, mask, title and format all of the images and copy. to streamline the downloading process, i used the swfPanel to tap into bridge's web access library using bridgetalk, and the rest was handled via as and jsx. sweeeeeeet!