Is there a way to see what color you already pushed to the led before you assign it another color?
Is the process time for sending 16 leds the same as sending 4? if not then it would be faster to check led color and only send if color changes?
For the first question – you can just check the value in the CRGB array to see what color you last pushed out to the leds (of course, once you change it, you can’t anymore). That is basically what the adafruit neopixel library is doing (it just hides the array of led data away from you, but these leds have no way to query them to ask them what color they are currently showing).
Unfortunately, for your second question, the way these strips work is you have to write all the data, or none of the data. You can’t just say “Write LED #10″. You might be able to play games with writing the first N leds, and let you change what that value of N is each time you call show, however in practice, when I played with this, I found that the complexity it introduced compared to the usability it provided meant it wasn’t worth it.
So in other words theres no speed up on the controller side sending an entire strip worth of color vs 5 leds. Gotcha!
I guess one last question… what license is your library?
Currently MIT License (it’s linked on the library page on googlecode). We might change the license a bit for the final release of V2, but it will still be a fairly free use license (leaning more towards MIT/FreeBSD than GNU’n’friends). We may toss in a clause that if you use the library for a project you need to send us videos for one off projects (we want to see what you’re doing!) and if it’s a manufacturered project/kick starter, consider at least offering the option of getting/buying one or two to us. (The latter as a result of seeing a number of kickstarter projects out there that use the library as a core piece of what they’re doing - and having spent some time doing support on the side for those projects - and supporting things blind is a pain).
Hell man I don’t mind sending you a product once it’s done! However due it being mostly private atm, I can’t send you much 
But kickstarter will be launched sometime in Janurary and I have no problem sending you video’s/pic’s then.
it’s a mod for arcade joysticks 
Just realized… this is the one link we do have public atm!
Nice, looking forward to see it! The bigger thing for me is “show us what you’re doing with it!” (even if the “us” is just @Mark_Kriegsman and myself :). I love seeing the things people are doing with the library - and I’ve lost count of the number of projects that I’ve been awed by, only to later find out that they’re using our library as a base
The “send us one” is a bit more tongue in cheek at the moment. I think. Depends on the things being made
True, and if you do play xbox or ps3 with arcade sticks and want one of these? I have no problem giving you a kit for free after the kickstarter 
Actually got something a lot like this in the works. I don’t plan to release it or anything like that its just something for fun. Mines going inside my custom mame arcade that I have right.
Nice! I’m building a custom GUI for controlling the colors and building your own animations
That’s really cool I hope to write a GUI for the hula hoop project I’m working on but it might be beyond my current skill set.
Processing is a easy to work with language for building quick ui’s