Adobe Photoshop is a very powerful tool that no graphic artist should be without. But one of the many things that slows people down is mass amount of things you can do with it. Panels can only do so much before it starts to crowd your desktop and Adobe sure has made strides at making that problem as small as possible. But one thing they have yet to cure is the mass amount of operations that you can do from the menu system.
Doing default actions in Photoshop like resizing the document to placing new smart object involve constantly going up to the menu system. That is, unless you are keen on memorizing literally hundreds of shortcut commands (oddly the place command has yet to get a shortcut).
Adobe has now fixed that problem by letting you create your own panels populated with anything you can do in Photoshop (almost). Welcome to the world of Adobe Configurator.
I know what you are thinking, more panels. While that is true, these panels let you define your own content so they are much more useful. Adobe has created an Adobe Air application that lets you create, organize, and save any number of panels you want for Photoshop CS4 (requires CS4).
The result is a time saving pallet complete with functions just for your needs.
The program is currently in beta and can be downloaded for free on http://labs.adobe.com