Initial work on the status bar

Hey,

This isn't fully integrated, only one of the messages goes through the status bar but it seems to work in practice. The other messages are printed out from deeper levels and I need to get more of an understanding of the structure of the code before pursuing them.

I think some things are better restructured a bit before this is continued too much. I don't want to further complicate the code if some refactoring needs to be done. 

The changes are explained in each commit message. Some stuff is a little unrelated but just good practice in my mind.

Mike