thanks for the warm welcome!
i'm already loving the designer (it already replaced PS CS 5.5). btw, yesterday the work book came - lovely! :)
thanks for moving it to the feature request forum. background for what i'm using the rasterize effect: i'm exporting a UI design together with all PNGs also to SVG. the SVG then stores all names of the PNGs and additionally the final positions and sizes, so its quite easy to parse it for further usage (here c++) without manually transfering positions of the assets. nice time saver! (was using PNG Express in PS before, but its not as comfortable).