Anybody left with POG scripting knowledge?

*raises hand*

Although my knowledge is primarily centered around coding activity/gameplay. 😛 I did try to do some UI coding once, but it wasn’t easy. I feel you with the tiny amount of examples provided in the SDK, but you’re in luck: there are already several mods that add additional UI and buttons to the game, and you can base your code off of them.
UniGUI is one of the best, considering that the others which I shall name all use it as a framework from which to branch out.
Future Trader may well be the single biggest; it adds full buying and selling of every commodity in the game when docked at random stations, although the specific stock available depends on the station, progress through the game, and friendliness to the station’s faction. Lots of UI here!
Station Save is simple: it adds an option to UniGUI to let you save your game whenever docked to a station. It’s a bit kludgy and bugs out easily, so I never used it much even though it’s installed. Still, it’s handy for an example.
There’s one more mod called Station Assault which, while not really adding any UI of its own, builds on Future Trader and UniGUI, though it doesn’t require either. It adds more gunstars to stations and lets you destroy said stations for cargo, then respawns them after a few hours. Hilarious fun! If you do install Future Trader, then you can buy gunstars for your own station, though they’re never really useful since your base is never really attacked per se.

All the mods should come with full source. I just double-checked, and Future Trader does for sure. In fact, its entire source is in one file, which surprised me. 😛 Station Save is by GrandpaTrout, but the other three are all by Zazicle, so they play well together. Hopefully this all will be helpful. 🙂

The only way to really test out code is to launch the game and do the thing that you coded. :/ Unfortunately, I never figured out a better way to do it. Every change will need a recompile, and then firing up the game again since it won’t register a change without a restart. I guess we’re lucky modern PCs can start the game so fast. This was my biggest gripe when trying to code things, and was the biggest time-sink.