Well, after I wrote this I stumbled on the readme in the gui developer.... and I realized I'll need a few custom components to do what I really want.
So.... guess I'm going to try to dive in. Writing a custom UI element is something I've always been intimidated to do, even after 2 years as a Java Swing developer (and that was a good while ago too.)
But I'm going to dive in. Expect some dumb questions here
