This has got to be the coolest thing I found out about today, thanks Kirupa.com. Check out the tutorial here. Photoshop scripting seems like it has a lot of potential. The best part about it is that you can use JavaScript, VB Script, or Applescript. I'd probably use JavaScript, since I'm most familiar with it but it is still cool that the options are open. I can't believe that I've never even HEARD of Photoshop scripting before. It's been around since 7 as far as I can tell, but you need a plug-in to make it work. It comes shipped with CS, so it's not like it isn't official or won't be around for a long time. You have pretty much full access to the program it seems like, so It's definitely something to research a bit more.

Adobe Photoshop Scripting forum

Adobe Photoshop Scripting Reference Material (also available in photoshop help files, I believe).

Javascript Reference (just for the hell of it).

And it's about friggin time! Seriously. Apparently it's been around for a month, but browsing the Macroemdia website I found this, an SDK released by Macromedia containing a C++ application with source for search engines to implement. It gives the engine the ability to convert the .swf into text so it can crawl it just like any other page. This is some great news for people who use full flash sites that needed to find alternative ways to get noticed by engines. I'm not sure how effective it is, or if it's in use right now or not, but I thought it was pretty cool.

I think dujodu.com needs a tech news section, that would be fun.

Also, after I made the switch to firefox I had to find a new in-browser spellcheck to catch my horrible spelling mistakes. This wasn't a problem obviously because of the huge community involved in mozilla/firefox extensions. I recommend SpellBound. Which is far better than IE Spell might I had, mwhahahahaha.

My pal Eric (who I'm sure you all know of by now) not only reminded me of cool RSS feeds today, but also brought to my attention an untapped part of the FireFox browser: Extensions. I knew firefox had extensions before, but I was never aware of how much access they really had. It's pretty freaking amazing actually. From what I can tell the exensions have pretty much complete control over what is happening. They can add context menu shortcuts, toolbars, option menus, and more. They can manipulate the code of a page in pretty much any way imaginable (locally of course) allowing for some really neat web development debugging tools. My favorite extension so far lets you turn images invisible, highlight block level elements, edit a pages CSS and view it live (!!!) destroy elements in a page, validate pages CSS, XHTML, XML, and much, much more!!! read more about it here. You really have to check this stuff out to see how powerful it is.

I've always been an IE guy myself, but that was more by default than anything else. FireFox has it's disadvantages, but that is mostly due to the fact that most pages are designed for IE.. hell, this one was! After tasting the power of FireFox (or maybe just open source in general?) I think having to crack open IE to view some pages correctly won't be that much of a hassle.. especially with the "Open in IE" firefox extension.

There are too many great extensions to cover all of them, so check out this page and have a look for yourself. Of course you are going to need to Get FireFox to take advantage of these features. Actually, some of them might even work with mozilla.