PIC18f2250 control over USB 2.0

[Guest jsags]

Hello everyone, im new to the forum so forgive me if im in the wrong category.

i have been toying around with microcontrollers for the past couple of years and have made 3-4 projects that met my expectations, but now, i feel like i want to learn how to use USB to interface my computer with my projects so that i can send info back/forth with the PC and the device i selected the pic18f2550 for its price and availability where i live, and found this on your site

http://www.electronics-lab.com/blog/?p=687

but it speaks of a bootloader which i have no idea of what it is or does (much less on how to make one)
and the page is in german.

what steps do i need to follow? or what do i need to program in order to be able to make this pc-pic interface without copyright infringements?

please, ive looked all around the internet and came to no satisfactory conclution.

for starters maybe the classic blinking leds tutorial would be fine (a link or advice would be nice:) ) that includes all programming aspects on the pc and the PIC thanks a lot and hope to hear from you soon!!

(BTW excuse my bad english)

[redwire]

I have used Processing to build a nice GUI for the PC in order to send commands to an XBee connected to the computer, which send the command wirelessly to another Xbee connected to a microcontroller (Atmel).    The site is www.processing.org.
  I know Arduino and Studio have hypertext window that will communicate but you are limited to text and data with no pretty background, pictures, buttons, gauges, graphics like Processing can provide.