October/November in KDE Itinerary

In the two month since the previous summary KDE Itinerary got a new trip map view, per-trip statistics and better Android integration, and we have been preparing for Transious’ move to MOTIS v2, to just name a few things.

New Features

Trip map

The move to a per-trip timeline view described in the previous issue enables a bunch of new per-trip features.

The first of those is a map view for all activities and locations related to a trip.

Locations and intermediate stops are interactive and show additional information when clicked.

Trip statistics

Itinerary now also shows a summary of the traveled distance, the estimated CO₂ emission and the total cost for each trip. The cost is based on information extracted from travel documents or manual editing of individual entries, and is automatically converted into your home currency if currency conversions are enabled in the settings.

Pre-defined locations for journey searches

All locations involved in the current trip are now added to the location search history for train or bus journey searches. They appear similarly to entries from past searches (but unlike those cannot be deleted).

This avoids having to enter locations again that you’ll likely need in public transport search during a trip.

New timeline layout

There’s ongoing work for an updated timeline layout, in particular for public transport journeys, making the effects of delays and disruptions easier to see. It’s not yet finished and integrated at the time of writing (but might very well be by the time of publishing this post), so this will be covered next time. In the meantime you’ll probably get to see pictures of it in one of the next “This Week in KDE Apps” posts on Planet KDE.

Infrastructure Work

MOTIS v2

Transitous, the community-run free and open public transport routing services used by Itinerary, is preparing to move to the next major version of the routing engine MOTIS.

This meant implementing support for the new MOTIS API in KPublicTransport. The new API provides more control over access and egress modes and transfer times and returns more detailed information for foot paths (more details here).

MOTIS v2 brings considerable performance improvements for OSM-based routing which should make it viable for Transitous to deploy door-to-door routing rather than just the current stop-to-stop routing. That is also the prerequisite for enabling support for shared vehicle routing eventually.

Android platform integration

There have also been a number of improvements on Android platform integration, most of which not just benefit Itinerary but all KDE Android apps.

• Fixed the translation lookup order when non-US English is used as one of multiple languages in the system settings.
• Fixed deploying and loading of Qt’s own translation catalogs.
• Implemented support for the 24h time format platform settings in locales that usually use a 12h format (CR 600295, available in Qt 6.8.1).
• Enabled support for app-specific language selection in Android 13 or higher.
• Foundational work on changing the application language at runtime in Qt and KDE Frameworks. For complete support this is still missing reevaluating locale API related expressions in QML (CR 599626).

There’s some more details in a dedicated post about this.

Matrix session verification

While trip synchronization over Matrix unfortunately didn’t get done after all in time for 24.12, there’s nevertheless progress here.

Most notable is support for Matrix session verification, which is a prerequisite for end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) communication.

After a fix in libQuotient the trip syncing code can now also handle attached documents, using Matrix’ built-in E2EE file sharing.

Lobbying & Politics

Last week I attended a networking event hosted by DELFI together with a couple of others representing various FOSS and Open Data projects and communities. DELFI is the entity producing Germany’s national aggregate public transport datasets. Those are used by Transitous and thus indirectly by Itinerary, and getting in direct contact with the people working on this is obviously useful.

• Most of what I heart was sensible and aligns with what we’d like to see as well, e.g. around quality gates for the datasets. One major exception was Deutsche Bahn’s refusal to allow DELFI to publish their realtime data. Coincidentally a new law mandating exactly that just had its first reading in the second chamber of the German parliament that day, so fortunately the pressure to publish this just keeps increasing.
• Lacking a better “official” channel some of the DELFI teams actually use the community-provided Github issue repositories as feedback channels for data issues. That works, any channel to get fixes upstream is good.
• The current realtime feed is supposed to cover about 70% of the static data and contain up to 22k concurrent trips according to DELFI, which is very far from what we actually see in Transitous currently. Where exactly that difference comes from isn’t fully understood yet though, but knowing the expectation and having people to talk to should help with resolving that.

This is the first time DELFI ran such an event also open to externals. Good to see some things slowly turning into the right direction after years of pushing by the community. There’s still much more to wish for of course, such as a deeper collaboration/integration between the stop registry and OSM.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• New or improved extractors for Agoda, Booking.com, Eurostar/Thalys, Flixbus, lu.ma, NH Hotels, NS, planway.com, Renfe, SBB, Thai state railway, Trenitalia and VietJet Air.
• Support for automatic price extraction from Apple Wallet files that use the currencyCode field.

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

Public transport data

• Unfortunately Navitia ended their service, so the corresponding backend has been removed. For most affected areas there are fortunately alternatives meanwhile, such as Transitous.
• Added support for the NS onboard API.
• Translated backend information are reloaded correctly now when the system language changes.
• Implausible turns in railway paths found in German GTFS shapes or Hafas responses are now filtered out.
• The journey query API now has support for indicating a required bike transport, for specifying direct transportation preferences and for returning rental vehicle booking deep links.
• More Wikidata logo properties are considered for line logos now.

Itinerary app

• Favorite locations used in a trip are now also part of a trip export.
• Transfers can now be added in more cases.
• Statistics also include transfers and live data where available, which should yield more accurate results.
• Incremental import of multi-traveler reservations has been fixed.
• The weather forecast on the entire day of departure and day of arrival is now included in the trip timeline.
• Checking for updates and downloading map data are now per-trip rather than global actions.
• Added a safety question before clearing the stop search history.
• Enabled importing GIF images on Android.
• Fixed importing DB return tickets via the online import.
• Fixed barcode scanning when using Itinerary as a Flatpak.
• Fixed display of canceled journeys.
• Fixed initial Matrix account setup working without needing a restart of the app.
• A fix for QtLocation map updates sometimes getting stuck until an application restart is still stuck in review (affects not just Itinerary).

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.