Athena, thank you very much! That is indeed simple and easy to use; it will fit my intents and purposes most perfectly!

Heh, you make me grin Jeremy. I am as stubborn as the day is long, and as determined to tackle the whole thing right at the beginning as I was before. Me, start with the easy stuff? No way! :lol: But, seriously, I won't be taking things too quickly here. I need to do some serious experimentation with Lua first to get my bearings, but it won't take long after that to write the full application. My intents aren't cross platform as of this moment because my intent is to design a tray application, which I don't know how to do in other OSes and have no interest in plumbing the depths of at this moment. That makes things easier since I can assume several things such as the existence of certain OS specific functions and methods.

I'm now on PIL 20.1 (Part III) and looking into pattern matching. This makes the whole business of making an RSS feed child's play to me, being a web designer/developer (self taught thus far), and would let me make "inter-script" functions; I assume that there is a way to call "CallFunction" with parameters, and its existence would make things simpler. Else there are clear and simple work-arounds.

I misunderstood the mailing-list for a newsgroup; newsgroups I dislike due to their rather restrictive nature of "You must have thus and such server to post a message" when for the most part I don't know what they're even babbling about. :?

So at the moment the design plan is as follows:

Step 1: Create the barebones application consisting of functions and a simple tray application. Icons are crafted at this stage too, to indicate whether a script is running or not, and if
there has been an error. An error console is of utmost importance, as well as a tabbed options dialog; I think an auto-show the error log might be important to begin with. Been there, done that, so it's mostly just deja vu -- and ensuring future expandability.

Step 2: Given a stable and versatile barebones app, with functions for dynamic menus and such, here is where the initial scheduling will occur. My first idea is to limit the execution to a maximum of once every two months, all the way down to once every few minutes or so. The "library" directory will be implemented as well as reading/writing of options to an application specific directory (partly for Vista support). For ease of installation of new scripts, I will enable a simple check item in the icon's menu that shows a square "drop form" at a selectable corner of the screen.

Step 3: With that done simple testing of scheduled "alert" scripts will take place to verify my timing/scheduling system operates. As well as some performance testing of it; for instance detecting the general load of the computer, testing to see if something is fullscreen (not entirely sure how to though) to ensure a script is not executed at a time of moderately high load. For instance, in the midst of a game. Waiting until the game ends will not hurt a thing. And a menu to allow for forced execution of the scheduled scripts, updating their last-run date, will also help allow a user override. The icon switching actually begins here, not sooner.

Step 4: With step 3 out of the way, the real bulk of the work picks up. Integrating Lua with the options, scheduling, and even per-script configuration (if really necessary). I don't think a global script does much at this stage, so that will come later, if at all. However the RSS functionality I want to write in lua at least, for instance "RSS.RegisterResult({result = 'pass', overview = 'yadda yadda yadda'})", so that on a per script basis things can be put together and then sent back to the application. If I do decide to use a global script at this time, the RSS functionality will be built in, and receive "messages" from other scripts by pass-thru functions to allow updating the feed. I will permit the user to set a limit upon the age of notifications, so they do not have too large a file to load.

Step 5: No real plan here just yet, but I figure the optimization, tweaking, and extension of Lua begins here. I'd like to add zip support, I'll use TurboPower Abbrevia, so that scheduled backups can happen and maybe hashing to generate file lists with built in hash information.