August/September in KDE Itinerary

Thursday, 3 October 2024 | Volker Krause

A lot has happened again around KDE Itinerary since the previous summary post two month ago: A new two-level trip/timeline view, extended public transport location search, a new website and more public transport data coverage to name just a few things.

New Features

Per-trip timeline

The probably biggest change is the replacement of the single combined timeline view that Itinerary had since its beginning with a two-level view consisting of a list of trips and a per-trip timeline view.

Top-level trip list view in KDE Itinerary showing past and upcoming trips.
Trip list view.

Work on prerequisites for this has been featured in the past two summary blog posts already, such as the more explicit trip grouping controls and the staging area for about to be imported data.

List of actions that can be applied to an entire trip.
Per-trip actions.

As trip grouping has become more relevant with this, there’s now multiple ways to explicitly control this:

  • Merge two adjacent trips.
  • Split an existing trip.
  • Select which trip newly added content belongs to.

New transport icons

Another visually very noticeable change are the new transport icons by Andy Betts, replacing the previously used incoherent mix of different icon styles.

Set of icons showing different modes of transportation.
Breeze icons for modes of transport.

The location picker for public transport searches can now also search for addresses instead of just stop names. Whether a result is a stop or an address can be distinguished by an icon, and more information about location results are shown when available (such as city, state/region and/or country), to help with identifying different places with the same name.

Public transport departure location search results showing both stops and addresses.
Searching for public transport stops and addresses.

Address search is only supported with the Transitous backend so far.

Another new way of getting to a location for a public transport search is via geo: URIs passed from other applications, which Itinerary can now handle on Linux and on Android.

Infrastructure Work

New Website

Thanks to work by Carl on allowing to customize the automatically generated apps.kde.org pages, Itinerary now has a much nicer website, reusing some of the great content created for the KDE for Travelers page.

Transitous

The work on Transitous and MOTIS would deserve its own post, so this is just scratching the surface here, focusing on changes most impactful for Itinerary users.

  • New base schedule coverage in France, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Turkey and USA.
  • New real-time data coverage in Croatia and Germany.
  • Support for via routing, transfer time settings and GTFS shapes in MOTIS (which yet has to be made available to our clients though).
  • Upgraded hardware thanks to an SSD donation, which should improve routing performance.

Matrix-based trip synchronization

The foundational work around explicit trip management in the past months has also cleared the path for synchronizing trips over Matrix. As mentioned in a previous post the work on this has now started.

Synchronization increases the requirements on precise change tracking and change notification, and it adds another path how data can change. The current implementation has been a bit sloppy in that regard, and improvements for this have already been integrated. This should fix timeline entries not updating correctly after an edit or receiving public transport data updates.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

  • New or improved extractors for BlablaBus, booking.com, DB, Entur, Eurostar, Eventim, Flixbus, Italo, Koleo, MAV, Reisnordland ferries, Reservix, SNCB, SNCF, Sunnycars, United Airlines and VDV e-tickets.
  • Support for importing Deutsche Bahn journey sharing links.

All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

  • Added access to BLS (Basel, Switzerland) and KVB (Cologne, Germany) public transport data.
  • Fixed access to BVG (Berlin, Germany) and ZVV (Zürich, Switzerland) public transport data.
  • Fixed missing intermediate stops in French long-distance trains, caused by incomplete data reported by ÖBB.
  • Migrated to a new train coach layout API in Germany, increasing the coverage for regional and local trains as well as increasing the level of detail for vehicle feature information such as the quantity rather than just the presence of bike or wheelchair spaces.
  • Improve data merging when location names are provided in localized and ASCII-transliterated forms.

Indoor map

  • Improved display of semi-transparent logos in dark mode in element info dialog.
  • Avoid element info dialog resizes during logo or image loading.
  • Show bus station quay numbers on the map.
Map of the Würzburg central station bus station showing quay numbers.
Bus station quay numbers.

Itinerary app

  • Fix some combo boxes not opening correctly in mobile mode.
  • Use the more compact seat display from the timeline view also on details pages.
  • Fix particularly long URLs not being detected as such during importing.
  • Allow to create events in any OSM building.
  • Fix showing arrival/departure times for disembark-only intermediate stops.
  • Android’s dark mode is now respected automatically.
  • Allow editing flight boarding groups.
  • Show per-day sections in public transport journey search results.

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.