suggestions for scripting alarms?

The issue of alarms, and the possibility of using applescript to create alarms, have been raised in this forum previously, but I am not aware of any specific solutions.

it would be great if it were possible to set alarms for items. A program I used in a past life, back in DOS (and early Windows) days, InfoSelect was great about this: you can create a new item and set an arbitrary alarm for it.

Any ideas on how to set an alarm–perhaps, say, change the text color of an item after a certain date, or make an item beep after a certain date, etc?

creating a tickler capability for some items (e.g., todo entries) would be a great help. Hogbay doesn’t have this, DT have this. Sticky brain had this but when I used it several years ago it was horribly slow, and I’m not keen on the interface. I would prefer to reduce the number of apps, but alarms/reminders is turning out to be a really important deal-breaker for me with DT