Mark - I was just reading about your book over at Amazon. Very impressive.

To all -
The items I am looking to add as enhancements are more gui driven. My first tasks I am attempting to accomplish is to keep animators purely right brained in a manner is speaking. Take out all the technical fuss so they can focus on breathing life into the character.
Posing and blocking controls I feel are the extent of my experimentation abilities for now. The power center control will change weight values. Giving a SENSE of mass while manipulating the character (I hope). Everything I've tried so far is not radical enough for my taste. Afterwards, I want to build a basic structure for facial animation using Kimball method. Click a button and general facial expressions are auto-added to the characters face controls. Just beginner stuff I find useful when animating. I am experienced in programmer (C++, VB, gaming scripts). I'm not very quick with my side projects. I have obligations that need to be met first. The difficult part is I've not tackled MEL other than copy/paste code to automate frequently used tasks.
Where should I turn to get a solid understanding for creating a gui floating window or channel box? Automating the setup of expressions and set-driven keys (controls) to buttons/sliders? A good reference books on MEL commands would be useful. I'm going to go ahead and purchase your book. However, it will need to wait a month (on a tight budget while being layed off).

Dannyngan - Here is a link to the team I work with if you or others are interested www.artemissoftware.com The machinima film is our fun break from the game we are working on.

KBrown - thanks for the tip! I'll have to look over that chapter and see how they do it.