I'm not trying to deflect the blame or anything, but many of the crashes that cause Maemo Mapper to die are caused by Maemo/Hildon itself, i.e. GtkNotebook (can seg fault when destroyed) and something surrounding bluetooth (can cause Maemo Mapper to crash when the GPS receiver goes out of bluetooth range).

I am still looking for ways to avoid the problems that cause the crashes.

Not sure what you're asking for here. If you just want a black screen, then create a new, empty repository, with no URL. Maemo Mapper draws a black square on areas of the map for which it has no map data.

cjackiewicz wrote the POI code, and I don't know enough about it to easily make those kinds of changes. It's certainly possible; I just want to focus on my areas of expertise first. Maybe ask cjackiewicz.

Maybe there are some image manipulation tools I can use to increase contrast. It might not look too pretty, though...

I like a clean user interface, but what kind of buttons did you have in mind?

Sounds reasonable...

You can always save your tracks separately and upload those to OpenStreetMaps (maybe after some modification).

I don't condone this, as it's almost definitely illegal on some level, and I'll probably get yelled out for even suggesting this, not to mention it undermines the entire purpose of OpenStreetMaps (to derive open-source map data)... But if you really wanted to "help out" OpenStreetMaps, I wonder what stops you from downloading routes from the GPX Driving Directions Web Service (say from "New York, NY" to "Los Angeles, CA", or from "34.05329, -118.24501" to "37.77916, -122.42005") and uploading the resulting GPX files (after some minor XSLT transforms) to OpenStreetMaps? ...