I'm working on a project for work, and was wondering if anyone could
give me some advice on how to accomplish some basic tasks with
sharepoint. These include:

1. Changing approval permissions so that instead of each page having
specific members that can approve items, each item has people with
permission to approve/reject it.

2. Notifying the member selected from a drop down menu that an item
is waiting for his approval (basically like setting up a one time
alert for another user).

3. This one's not really a task, but I was wondering if anyone could
give me some basic pointers on customizing the default add items
forms in sharepoint. I'd like to give mine a bit more functionality
than is possible with the basic browser editing options, but don't
know what to open in sharepoint.