new glyphs / encoding / accessing characters

I've designed several fonts, but took a 15-year hiatus, during which time Opentype was developed and many other changes have taken place.

I'm producing a font now for a designer friend, and have had success creating glyphs, etc., but cannot seem to find a way to access some of them using the keyboard. (I'm on Mac OSX, FWIW.) I have a few alternate characters -- variations on a few letterforms, plus such ligatures as ce, ct, ffi and ffl, that aren't in the standard Type 1 PS character set.

I've come to understand that they can be named and encoded in Unicode, but I've not found a master list of characters, so to properly name them and have them accessible by applications. I am also not sure how to access them if not via the keyboard -- which I know to be different on a Mac and on a PC.

Then there's the whole encoding issue, which has gotten much more complex since I was designing for Mac Type 1 PS and Windows TTF....

This could be basic stuff, but it's not explained in a way I can grasp (or at a level of detail I seem to need) in the manual, and I've not found any tutorials that completely satisfy my curiosity. Any and all tips and referrals would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike Diehl