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The thousand small applets each doing a thing sounds like a really good approach.

I looked at the thing that all computer courses/books had in common that didn't work: the method of 'follow me along this path, and poof! you're a programmer.' And then I thought about the complex skills that I *had* learnt and came up with learning to play an instrument, where you start by doing small things over and over until they're second nature Think of learning to type 'adsdfa': you do it again and again until you can do it in your sleep. So now I'm creating variables and arrays and changing values and occasionally calling functions, over and over and over until everything I'm doing has become second nature and I no longer have to think about it. And I'm very much at the start - I am currently working on truly grokking opening and saving files (there are some surprises left) - but I've solved my first couple of challenges, and I feel that it's sticking. Go me.

And thanks for the code snippet - I shall investigate more when I have the time. The custom group colour probably is something I should post to suggestions if I ever get around to *that* - because you'd need to tag is somewhere or otherwise devise an interface for 'use this colour for this group.' But yeah. When you're not made to feel stupid for not knowing everything yet, programming is a lot of fun. Who'd have thunk ;-)