Yeah, I wound up grabbing ADW and am fairly happy with it. Still haven't found a theme I quite like -- white-on-black with blue highlights instead of lime green -- but it's looking all right for the moment.
Used some Christmas money to pay the $6 for NewsRob. I think that's a little excessive, but what the hell, I've been using it for months and like it pretty well.
BTW, Chu-Chu Rocket is Amazon's free app of the day.
-- MEANWHILE --
Spent most of today setting up the Nexus 7. It's interesting so far. I eventually found a
simple rooting script for bash; ClockwordMod didn't work for some damn reason but fortunately it included Team Win and that one worked okay. (Great, actually -- touch controls and all.)
mtpfs is the craziest fucking thing I've seen all...well, all week, I guess. I was gonna say all month, but it's been a pretty fucking crazy month.
Anyway. mtp. There's an OpenSUSE package but it's a weird standalone command instead of using the mount command; I couldn't even cd into the mounted directory except as root, and that worked for about five minutes before it locked up, I had to kill the whole shell with sudo kill -9, and it wouldn't mount again after that. (Which is consistent with complaints I've read from other users who said they could only get mtp to mount once per boot.) Plugged it into a Windows machine and it worked better, but was still pretty eccentric; doesn't work for shit on a parallel filecopy, there's no "safely remove" option in the tray, and even on refresh it wouldn't show new directories that programs had added (eg after I ran fbreader it set up a Books directory, but I couldn't see it in Explorer, couldn't even access it by typing out the full path, but if I tried to create a new folder called Books it wouldn't do it -- no error, it just reverted back to New Folder if I tried). Now, maybe this is one of those things that if I say "This is better than just mounting the fucking filesystem HOW, exactly?" I'll look like a fool in two years when it's well-supported and the answer is obvious. (Like the mouselook/WASD control scheme in Marathon. Or running system-intensive games in Windows instead of just dropping to DOS. Or texting.) But for now, I don't fucking get it.