The sticking pins on the map idea is attractive but some of the NOTAM affecting your route will have their centres off your map. This is because they have a very large radius of influence (e.g. a long-range navaid u/s or a notification of a number of geographically separated restricted areas like nuclear sites).
Ian Fallon has done a good job with NotamPlot, helped by AvBrief providing the data feed. Peter Mundy and Olof Bakker have made a start with Navbox providing a smilar facility but last time I looked it still had a long way to go.
And as for that "stupid arse-about-face way of entering the time and date", you can thank the inventors of the machine you fly for that. As the two bicycle mechanics from Dayton Ohio were American, ICAO chose their way of writing dates. You have to write it the same way for a flight plan so you may as well get used to it. Ditto for the route syntax by the way.
ICAO indicators are hardly difficult to find, they are after all printed on your chart next to the a/d. a/d names are not unique worldwide and this is a resource with worldwide capability. If you put Manchester in do you mean
EGCB (Manchester Barton)
EGCC (Manchester International)
EGCD (Manchester Woodford)
or
KMHT (Manchester, New Hampshire)?
Try clicking the down arrow next to the box you need to fill in and you will get a search screen that allows you to fill in the name. Try sticking X in the ICAO code box on the search screen and you will get a list of dummy ICAO codes that have been created to cover UK a/d that do not have their own code.
Lastly, spend half an hour reading the documentation, it's worth the effort.
Mike