In the current release, there is an instant notification (an animation and the titlebar has the name of the app in it). Also, some of the built-in apps already take advantage of a feature that allows applications to take screenshots of themselves. These screenshots will then be used as a placeholder until the application starts up. This makes the UI look really quick and responsive and the apps look as if they start up instantly.

Third party applications can take advantage of this as well by using hildon_gtk_window_take_screenshot().

See this mailing list post for a link to example code: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...er/021340.html