On the topic of theme development... Actually, it's a lot easier than you'd think; no special compilers or anything required. The "theme" consists of your images along with a "themeDef.xml" file that describes the theme layout. You can customize anything, and achieve the "Special functions" such as next alarm time, etc just by specifying different "keys". I'm going to try to sit down and makeup a bit of a walkthrough/howto for theme development but that'll probably happen after I finish the rest of the app (the alarm settings screen) and get a full release out. In the mean time, the current themes are stored in:
/usr/share/flipclockC/themes
Take a look, each theme has a directory, and within that there's the image files along with the "themeDef.xml" file.

Let's say you want to make another theme to play around with/experiment. Just create a copy of one of the existing ones... say "defaultFlip", and place it into the themes directory. So imagine you want to make a new theme called "myAwesomeTheme":

1. Create /usr/share/flipclockC/themes/myAwesomeTheme directory
2. Copy contents of /usr/share/flipclockC/themes/defaultFlip to your new myAwesomeTheme folder
3. Modify/delete/alter any of the images you want; add your own, remove the ones you don't care about
4. Update the themeDef.xml file to reflect the layout and details of your theme.
5. Launch Flip, and press the "next theme" button; it will now cycle between all three themes (Flip, Night, Your theme).

There's more to it than that of course, and you have to be careful sometimes if you do something silly/make a mistake in your theme you'll crash Flip, but as I said there'll be more of a writeup as soon as I get the chance. If you want help/further details/etc just let me know and I'll be happy to share what I know!