premature announcement: speech bridge

as I mentioned earlier, I was working on a tool to bridge speech 
recognition from Windows VM to drive a Linux environment. I now have 
something good enough for plaintext dictation.  You can find it on 
git-hub https://github.com/alsoeric/speechbridge

what I need to know is how to detect events such as focus changes, and 
currently active window and application.  later on, it would be useful 
to know how to operate on text areas (searching, selecting region etc.).