“Therefore, we’re looking at letting upcoming versions of Photoshop and–as far as I know–all Creative Suite applications be extended via SWF panels (palettes) created in Adobe Flash or Flex.”
There seems to be a lot of negative comments about usability, platform inconsistency, etc. However, I’d argue those are short-sited. At first, it may be true that plug-ins developed via this technique aren’t consistent, but I’d rather suffer through a little bit of pain for long term gain. The Flash platform is becoming more and more capable, and by providing extensibility through a simpler, widely adopted language, it should help vastly increase the number of available plug-ins.
Platforms are often rough in V1 — but give them a chance to grow and see what develops.