Not the original poster, but, I had the same problem. I had read this thread and much of the wiki, downloaded the maps, and took my n900 with me while driving to jury duty today. I had a vague idea of where to go but didn't know the specific route.

Opened the modRana route option, entered the route, it showed on the map, but I couldn't find a way to "start" the navigation routing. Finally pulled over to the shoulder of the road and stuffed the sim back into my Android phone. Google nav got me to jury duty.

While I had read much of the documentation and played with modRana at home, I hadn't navigated with it until I was in the car. Once I was in my car, I wasn't really in a position to dig through either this thread or the wiki to figure out how to activate the navigation.

When I got home I set up a route to my local deli and walked there. The navigation route worked fine at that point and I can see how to turn it on.

I do realize this is free, alpha software and you're only just starting to polish things up. But, it would be REALLY REALLY helpful to be able to turn on navigation from the Route page (rather than pre-program the Route and start it through "Route => Current Route => Tools".)

If POI is meant to be the way to type in addresses and get to them on the fly, then, it should (somehow) be made clear through the screens. Right now, I don't see anything that looks like it's meant for "on the fly" navigation.

There needs to be a way to suddenly activate GPS routing at a minimum for those "oh damn" moments when you're shifted to a detour you don't expect (edit: and didn't have modRana running till you were detoured -- I don't mean re-routing an existing session). Or, when you're out at a place you do know and are asked unexpectedly to drive somewhere you don't know.

Related to this, a way to *easily* chose start and end points (either for routes or POI) from your Contacts list addresses would be awesome. Something simpler than typing the address in by hand, which again necessitates pulling the car over when it may not be safe/convenient. I'm borrowing this from Android's Google Nav, which is the service I've been using. It doesn't seem like all that big a deal until you start to use it and it seeps into your GPS-expectation-subconscious .

Again, I do realize this is development software that one person is working on, not one of Google's pet "eternal beta" products that has a dedicated team updating it on a full-time basis. Reading over this thread I can see how modRana has been progressing over the past few months to really seem like it's catching up to Google Nav in performance.

Awesome software, hope you'll consider the suggestions, off to click the paypal support link!