February/March in KDE Itinerary
In the past two months since the previous report we added a new welcome screen, warnings about some potentially expensive mistakes and support for more data sources in Switzerland to KDE Itinerary, among many other improvements.
New Features
Improved welcome screen
The welcome screen shown on the first start of Itinerary has been reworked and now contains the most relevant settings instead of a wall of text:
- Confirming or correcting your home country if it hasn’t been correctly detected based on the system locale. This is needed for country-dependent warnings to work correctly, such as the features in the next section.
- Enable online services. Those are all off by default for privacy reasons and the settings page offers very finegrained control over what exactly to use. All that remains the case, but the welcome page now has a quick shortcut to enable all of this in one go.
- Request permissions for showing popup notifications, on systems where that is necessary, such as newer Android versions.
EU roaming regulation warning
When living in the EU roaming regulation area you’ll now get notified when leaving that, as depending on your mobile data plan this can be rather costly when not paying attention.
Misleading airport/port name warning
A similarly unpleasant surpise can be ending up at a port or airport in the middle of nowhere rather than close to the city you intended to travel to. Marketing names particularly popular with certain low-cost carriers can be especially misleading, see the naming controversy around (Frankfurt-)Hahn Airport as one such example.
Itinerary can now warn about such locations, with the option to silence the warning per trip or indefinitely.
The list of warned about locations is currently still manually maintained, and is totally not based on traveling mishaps of community members.
Infrastructure Work
Swiss Open Transport Data APIs
There’s now support for version 2.0 of the OpenJourneyPlanner (OJP) API from opentransportdata.swiss as well as their train formation API.
This gives us a couple of additional features and information:
- Earlier/later paging of journey search results.
- Transport modes served at stops.
- Occupancy information.
- Service alerts.
- Pickup and dropoff constraints for stops.
- Coach layouts for trains.
- Vehicle attributes such as the availability of accessibility or comfort features.
- Emission information.
All of this also benefits KTrip.
Kirigami Addons date/time picker localization
The date and time entry controls used in Itinerary received a number of fixes for languages using a right-to-left layout and/or non-ASCII numerals.
This benefits all applications using the Kirigami Addons.
Events
In February we had another OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe, with a few features for Transitous being worked on that will eventually also benefit Itinerary.
FOSSGIS-Konferenz in Göttingen is ending today, and included a talk about our OSM indoor router.
And in two weeks I’ll be speaking about Transitous at Grazer Linux Tage.
Fixes & Improvements
Travel document extractor
- Added or improved travel document extractors for Booking.com, DRK, Entur, European Sleeper, Eurostar, Eventyay, FCM, FRS, Get Your Guide, Hostelworld, MÁV and Thai railways.
- Improved generic boarding time extractor for Apple Wallet passes.
- Improved street address matching.
All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!
Public transport data
- Trip queries (ie. efficient updates of an existing public transport connection) are now also available with Entur’s OpenTripPlanner instance in Norway.
- Improved and extended vehicle attribute mappings for a number of Hafas-based backends.
- Support for Hafas location remarks, providing e.g. stop map links with some Hafas backends.
- Support for Hafas pickup/dropoff constraints of on-demand services.
- Fixed coordinate-based journey queries with Deutsche Bahn.
- Added support for server-side mode filters for stopover queries with MOTIS backends.
- Made Deutsche Bahn vehicle layout parser more robust against unknown UIC coach numbers.
- Fixed INVG mode mapping for bus lines showing up as ferries.
- Fixed elevators being shown on null island on the map.
- Made path spike filtering less aggressive on low-resolution paths. Fixes e.g. the path of a Barcelona <-> Paris train connection incrementally deteriorating on the map.
- Expanded Transitous coverage to Greenland, Japan, Morocco and Oman.
All of this also directly benefits KTrip.
Itinerary app
- More consistent display of delays, by always showing the actual time in full. Avoids having to compute this from delay offsets in your head.
- Fixed manual flight number entry (bug 516999).
- Correctly account for the platform label width when eliding stop name in public transport departures view.
- Word wrap vehicle feature descriptions.
- Fixed platform section end separator positioning.
- Fixed doubled lines for flights on the map when using MapLibre.
- Default to creating a new trip group when importing a named trip group.
- Set a better default for event entrance times without a start time yet.
- Also detect osm.org short URLs for importing OSM elements.
- Retain attached documents from event templates.
- Handle nested events correctly when computing trip group end times.
How you can help
Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.