It turns out you can drive many of Adobe's Creative Suite applications via a Flash plug-in from within Adobe Illustrator. What really gets me excited, though, is the fact that you can pick and choose features and functions from each CS application and combine them into your own custom über-application.

In this example, I needed to download ~16,000 images for an Etsy 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. Downloading images via Flash from the internet to the desktop required a prompt for every file, so to streamline the downloading process, I developed a Flash plug-in that tapped into Bridge's Web Access Library (which supported
batch downloading) using BridgeTalk. Translation: We can hijack unique functionality from any CS application and in order to have all functionality available to us at once.

After the files were downloaded, using a combination of ActionScript and ExtendScript code, the plug-in automatically placed, scaled, masked, populated the textfields, applied the text styles, saved and moved on to the next file until the ~1,000 posters were complete. Sweeeeeeet!