Called Paint, the idea is to have four main colors at the edge of the screens. By the phone's tilt, those colors will bleed into the screen itself, causing the animation, and interactivity with the phone regardless of whether or not you're actually accessing an app. The LWP actually becomes as fun to use as anything else on the phone.

The basic setup is contained in this Gist.  There's more to add, but I made my quota for the day, and I want something to work on tomorrow.

The previous statement isn't much of a surprise in this day in age, but I think I should qualify what I mean.

I've been having a lot of fun playing with the software internals of my new phone.

The Motorola Droid has been quite the versatile little device.  I've thrown nearly all I can think of at the thing, and it handles it smoothly and without issue.  In the past 4 weeks, I've rooted, flashed, reflashed (I'm indecisive), cleared, recovered, flashed again, and customized to my heart's content. Currently, it looks like this:

That's right... Shiny.

There's a fantastic community of people who create and contribute to these modifications over at alldroid.org, particularly in the forums.  I've met some good people out there, who really know what they're doing.

I recently dual-booted my desktop, so I could get back in and do some fun playing around.  Unfortunately, I chose a 64-bit operating system, and they're not supported for the android source tree and utilities. (A poor excuse, I want to see what I can do to fix that.) So I've been debating the past couple days, whether or not to clear my new install, and put on Ubuntu 32-bit edition when it comes out, so that I can tear into the source and help contribute to the site.  Most likely I'll wait until 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) comes out; I've loved what I've seen and played around with so far, so it'll be good to get in there and play around with my phone's internals.

One of the big requests on the alldroid forums is the ability to hot-swap phone ROMS without the need for a full reboot.  I think I have an idea on how to accomplish that.  In the same way that the Xen environment handles virtualization, we need to create a custom kernel that handles virtual ROM running. There would obviously be a performance hit, but with people overclocking their droids to 800MHz up to 1.3 GHz, I don't think there would be much complaining.  Basically, we need to let the ROM handle hardware switching from one ROM to the next, and let the internals provide the rom connection.

Just having ideas.  Others include a complete revamp of the Web, and a new OS.  I'll get to those at another time.

Other phone screenshots:

Found on http://www.makinggoodsoftware.com/

However, the overwhelming response to the announcement yesterday was that of its name: "iPad." Throughout the afternoon, the 2nd-highest trending topic on twitter was 'iTampon,' a not-so-subtle play on the name. Many jokes set in along the same lines:

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/alissa-walker/designerati/apple-ipad-name-not-winning-women

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/the-ipads-name-makes-some-women-cringe/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704094304575029603030082186.html?mod=WSJ_Small+Business_sections_management

This led people to question: "Who in their right mind would use this name?  Especially considering this MADtv Clip?"

Others: "Were there NO women on Apple's naming board?"

Personally, I think Apple knew EXACTLY what they were doing.  It thrives off of the idea that "any publicity is good publicity." Everyone now has the name iPad stuck in their mind, even if it was because they heard it in a joke somewhere.  They know what the device is, and they knew about the MADtv sketch.  As these things get passed around more and more, it will create more interest in the actual device.

On top of that, Apple's fans are the some of the most extreme technology followers, even worse than Stallman, et. al. in the GNU/Linux world. These people, who would buy the device anyway, coupled with the tech world, who is actually impressed with the functionality, makes me think that even with the interesting choice of name, they've still got a hit on their hands.