Alas I've seen a trend where product designers and front-end engineers like to add animated transitions to UI elements. I find it just slows me down, waiting for the software to be done being clever. I do think animations have a place, when the computer wants to draw my attention to something. However if I initiated the action (clicked on something, etc) I don't really need to wait for that to "take effect" unless there's some slow action behind the scenes which is being reflected by the animation.

Please: by default no animations, add animations to draw the user's attention (not waste the user's attention).

and I said nothing...

AvE (crusty canadian enginerd on youtube) had a couple of interesting videos on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This is something that proposes to solve the hardware and wireware in one system: http://www.makeblock.cc/. They're pretty new -- their kickstarter campaign just finished.

I just got an Arduino for Christmas, and I'm having a blast learning electronics. (I'm programmer by profession, so the coding part is only mildly challenging/interesting.)

The thing I've been enjoying about the Arduino is the community. When I hook an LED up, why do I need a resister? How do I compute -which- value resister I need? What do I need to run a 1A brush motor? So far I've very often found these questions have already been answered (with ideas, suggestions, hardware, etc).