Some little intricacies about beamer.

1. The list of commands that work outside frames (when ignorenonframetext is set) is hard-coded. That's annoying as it means that wrapping one of these in another command, or modifying one, doesn't work. The new command has to be wrapped in \mode<all>{}, or added to the list (which is in beamer@treat set in beamerbasemodes.sty).

2. The beamerpauses counter works a little differently inside and outside lists. Basically, the count is off by one in one of them. When using a list with automatic pausing ([<+->]), one can write \alert<.>{alert} to get something alerted as it is unveiled. However, outside a list, one has to use \alert<.(1)>{alert}. Also, putting a \pause straight after a list makes it pause twice. But not putting a \pause means that it doesn't pause at all. The solution is to subtract one from beamerpauses and then do a \pause (of course, one should put this into a separate command, say \itpause, in case this behaviour gets corrected later on; then simply putting \itpause equal to \pause will mean that the correct behaviour is always correct). Where it gets confusing is in adding additional pauses within a list environment. The first has to be an \itpause and the rest \pauses, but there has to be a last \pause before the next item.