[Phanx]

Flashing every second sounds pretty annoying, and wouldn't actually communicate any useful information. Generally a UI element should only flash to grab the user's attention. However, if nothing important has changed (a spellcast going from having 8s left to having 7s left isn't imporant) then you're just distracting the user for no reason.

What could be a good animation would be to animate the height of incoming (just added) bars -- start them at 1px height and quickly grow them up to full height. This would make it easier to see which bar was added, and make it feel less "jumpy" when other bars were pushed up/down as a result.

Animating outgoing bars in a similar way would be a nice touch, too, but I'm not sure how feasible that is within the framework of LibCandyBar. Maybe you could use the "pause" API to freeze the bar just before it ended, animate its height down to 1px, then use the "cancel" API to remove it.

If the bars are anchored to each other, then animating the height of the incoming/outgoing bar automatically animates the position change of the surrounding bars.

Otherwise, since the value of a timer bar is constantly changing, I just don't think any additional animation on top of that would be useful; at that point you're just adding noise. If you wanted to highlight "ending soon" bars, just change the bar color --- at, say, 3s remaining, start a 1s transition to your highlight color, so 2s and below is the new color.