Although hinted to be available in the forthcoming PR1.2 through some desktop widget trickery, Vlad Vasiliev got bored and has posted a video demoing a "live" animated wallpaper on his N900: The live wallpaper app is in beta stage. The app does a smooth movement of wallpaper in the background. Live wallpaper is a Google magic on its Nexus One. This app is not that interactive as Google Nexus One's wallpaper but slowly getting there.
Thomas Perl's "UX weeks" kicked off with preferences dialogues, best practices and a concentrated attempt to improve several applications': What do we expect as a result of this week? A list of best practices for preferences dialog design on Maemo 5. Example screenshots of good dialogs (and why they are good). Example screenshots of bad dialogs (and why they are bad + improvement suggestions). Developers of affected apps contacted and provided with mock-ups, patches, .ui files, etc. The thread seemed to garner quite a lot of interest, and is a way by which many people can improve applications - without being a developer, or a "proper" designer.
Not one to rest, Thomas Perl has now started the second UX week; concentrating on icons - both in the applications menu, and Application Manager: This week I got the suggestion by someone that we should focus on icons. I'm not a graphic artist myself, but I know there are lots of helpful and able designers on this forum - it's your chance to help out here and make the UI more prettier. Designers should then help out with fixing the icons or creating new ones and sending them to the application maintainer who can then hopefully easily replace the icons without having to do much coding. There's room to help in highlighting sub-optimal icons, as well as posting your own suggestions for improvements.