Raymond.  lots of interesting ideas here.  But they go lots of different ways,  some which I think you can already deliver. 

1.  Conditional Formatting:  We have had this idea on our drawing board since we first did conditional rendering.  

2.  New Record Warning:  This could be accomplished today with a model that queried for the new records.  We have also built solutions that do polling, so that a model gets its new records as they are saved, and then elements on the skuid page are exposed. 

3.  Aggregated numbers:   You can do a few things here.  You can use merge syntax  {{$Model.myModelName.data.length}} to retrieve the number of rows.  Or you can create an aggregate model that returns the count of rows that match your criteria. 

So yes… 

But thanks for your creative ideas here - keep them coming. 

Thanks for your response. Ultimately I would like the end user to be able to select any field on any object I allow and choose query conditions that would trigger alerts. That would put a great deal of power in the hands of the end user that would be hard to recreate if you had to have the developer create a bunch of models and actions every time a user wants to be alerted when a custom field is updated to a certain value for a particular customer. The tools are probably all there and with enough time, patience, and creativity, it could probably be built, but having that functionality built in as part of the managed package seems like s huge value add. Thanks