Hi @rfresh737, welcome to the community
Some people had a HID (human interface device aka keyboard/mouse) working on the older particle core, I dont think its ready on the Photon just yet. Do a search of the forums on HID and you should get a couple of hits. to get you started have a look at this one -
As for point 2 - its totally doable! you can use the WebIDE to write the code, you then click the device you want to send it to and click the flash button, 2 seconds later the device reboots and runs the new code. sometimes it has to update the main code which takes a little while but its all automatic. the only time you may have a problem is if you write bad code that stops the photon from accessing the cloud to get the update, but they thought of that too, so you can put the device in safe mode (but you need to access to the device)
I have cores and photons all over my house and i can update them all from my office easily. Get to know the cli tool too, it makes things easy