No worries, we are here to learn and help each other, and what’s a better way to learn than teaching, amirite?
Good luck with your coding marathon. 
Yeah, I know what you mean, I did those back in MTA with a function called dxDrawImage. That made things so much easier, but what can I say, it is what it is.
Currently I’m looking at custom loading screens and a way to do nice little notifications, like a box containing the message coming down from the top of the screen, then going out the same way.
For the loading screen I see HTML + JS solutions, and by reading the [How-To] Use NUI (UI Creation with HTML) thread, I strongly believe that I can use NUI to create the notification too.