Also, how about a notification that google was notified successfully with a ping when a new map is created, and if no changes are made, does it still notify google or is there a check for that?
Google is notified every time when sitemap is created, doesn't matter how many changes (if any) were made. Since Google does not differ sitemaps by the number of notifications, it is not a problem to do it as often as one like.
one more thing - is there anyway to have it show you if there is a crawl in progress and the IP of the startup of that crawl or if it is a cron job?
Perhaps even stop you from starting another crawl if one is in progress right now, and offer to stop the one in progress just in case you have a runaway with 'do not interupt' set? You got a pretty decent set of stats on the left side, that would be a great place to plop such info.
If you will open the "Crawl" page of the script while crawler is currently running, you will see its progress state and the link to interrupt it.
