Adam:
I actually agree on you that there should indeed be more focus from nokia on some of the apps. Although, at the same time, it seems that thay have been focusing on making the simplest possible apps with a single cordinated design guidlines. It works on most of the cases pretty well, but just doesn't compare too well against apples design.

Now, remember that Canola is nokia product. Just not an official one. And I think it's a great product, just not the one I needed.

At the same time, I feel compelled to also counter argue that it is great that nokia has decided to go for such on open approach. Make a platform and not force their apps to be the only ones. Leave room for innovation. Then, if the innovations are good, copy the idea, perfect it and launch a polished product in their own name.

About the animation, well, at the moment, it does support animation when you finger scroll, although it's not smooth. You just need to have ATM at least 21 albums for it to work. It seems that it may be that it's as smooth as it can get (although I'm hopefully wrong on this one). UK MP uses pygame for drawing the UI, which itself uses SDL to do the actual drawing on the screen. From what I've read, it seems that:
a) SDL isn't the fastest platform to be doing fullscreen updates.
b) SDL on maemo is only compiled and not assembler optimized (e.g. gp2x has optimized versions).

Anyway, I'm not ready to start optimizing UK MP yet. It needs to stabilize first. Also, after the player works otherwise well, I can then take a few days to add animation like eye candy.

About your covers,
UK MP retrieves all covers from the net by itself and relies on yahoos thumbnail images. I might add support to try to retrieve image from the mp3 itself, but I'm not sure if that's easy enough to do. That's why the quality is a bit lacking.