Hey there !

I am planning to make a Google Now kind of application for the Plasma Desktop. Vishesh Handa came up with this idea.
I would display various kinds of information on Cards. These cards will be put on a plasmoid. And the plasmoid is scrollable.
Hence, I need to make some designs for showing this stuff nicely.

Some kind of information I am gonna want to display are:

Flight Reservation:
- Flight Name, Number, Date
- Departure Time and Airport Name and Code
- Arrival Time and Airport Name and Code
- An airplane to make it look even cooler
- Time

Event Reservation:
- Date
- Reservation Number
- Reservation Name
- Location (proper Address)
- Name of person

Hotel Reservation:
- Hotel Name
- Reservation Status
- Name of guest
- Address of Hotel
- Phone Number
- Check-in and Check-out date

Restaurant Reservation:
- Date
- Restaurant Name
- Address
- Start time of reservation
- Party Size

Now, one thing that I notice among the details, is that we have a common field of Address.
Also, having individual plasmoids for each of them is not desirable since, it would be tiresome for the end user to have as
much as 4 plamoids on the desktop is not very appealing. Hence, I am thinking of having a common scrollable plasmoid, and having
cards that will display the reservation information.

Also, the each of the details may change. But mostly (I think) that they'll remain the same. You can have a look here.http://vhanda.in/blog/content/images/2015/02/flightinformation.jpeg

What do you guys say ? If you could also come up with mockups, it would be really great

Cheers
Aditya
IRC: g33kyaditya

Something cool you could include is the local times that a flight gets to a destination. So that you know that it is 10:55 PM local time.

I'm not a designer, but I thought this might be interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws. According to that article, you should be able to get all details on a specific event by answering these questions: Who/What/When/Where/Why/How. So it seems like this would be useful in how you display information on these KDE Now cards. If you can figure out the answers to each of these questions, you know exactly what to display for every type of event or reservation. Then you can decide which of these are more important to the user and show them accordingly. Maybe you can go for a compact/full type of card where you shown only the information you deem important by default (compact) and allow the user to expand to a full card showing all information.

I think this is easier explained with an example so I'll try to apply this to a flight reservation:
Who is doing it?: the user, John Doe, together with Jane Doe and John Smith
What is happening?: Catching Vueling Flight 8991
When is it happening?: Sunday, February 1, 2015, 21:00h
Where is it happening?: Brussels Airport (BRU), Terminal 1
Why is it happening?: Having a vacaction in Spain
How is it happening?: In-flight meal is kosher, checked in online with seat number 21, link to flight confirmation email, link to KDE Now card for arrival
This gives a rather complete view of the departure for this flight, though it's clear that some of the information is not as important as the rest. First off, the Who is not really relevant since this will always be the user of KDE Now. Even if it includes some other people, this is not critical information to display. The What, When and Where are clearly important since these are critical to actually catching the flight. The Why and How are again not that critical, though it might be useful to be able to see some of the information from the How like the in-flight meal and seat number.

This corresponds mostly to the mockup you already have, though a clear difference is that this says nothing about the arrival. I think that's because this format forces you to be specific about your events and the departure and arrival of a flight have different When and Where answers. You could put both answers in the When and Where, e.g. from 21:00h to 22:55h and from Brussels to Barcelona, but I think it might be better to treat these as separate events. That allows you to provide more detailed information for each, for example the How might be different for the Arrival card where you could put info about the Barcelona airport or car rentals. Linking the cards for these 2 events, the arrival and departure, would still allow you to show parts of one on the other. So you could still show the arrival time on the departure card but it would also link to the card itself. And of course the "Now" aspect of having separate cards is that you can have a separate notifications for the departure and arrival, showing relevant information for each. This concept would apply to other events as well, like hotel reservations with a check-in and check-out date.

It's not a mockup, but I hope it still helps with how you display your information to the end-user.

This certainly seems like a good thing. But then again, as you pointed out, we might be leaving a few things out. So, as of now, I am thinking of an abstract with WHAT, WHEN, WHERE. And as soon as I expand it, it would give extra information, like Seat Number or Party Size or other small details

Excuse me if I'm not really understanding this project, but wouldn't that be like a plasmoid for Kontact, but limited to events cards? If yes, why not making a real Kontact plasmoid we could place it, for instance, in our "Social" desktop activity and have a complete summary of our personal information ,events, messages, tasks..., not just reservations, like in our mobiles? As in Kontact, one could select which info wants to see summarized, so if one just want's to see their calendar events, they could just activate that component.

Sorry if I'm not understanding well your idea, I admit it's very possible; I think it has a great potential, but the perspective I think you have seems to me a limitation of what you could really do and a infraexploitation of Akonadi's potential.

@eemantsal He ended up doing this as a GSoC project, so you might wanna check his blog posts on that. The latest one is here:
https://g33kyaditya.wordpress.com/2016/ ... kde-now-9/
It includes a demo video, so that might make it easier to understand.

As I understand it, this is not just showing calendar events which you might also see on your calendar in Kontact. It looks through the mails in your IMAP account and recognizes different types of cards from these. The mails would need a small amount of special markup as described here: https://developers.google.com/schemas/now/cards. This is the same schema that Google Now uses to recognize these cards from emails, so it's likely that the additional markup will be made available on plenty of mails.

@arucard Ah, I thought it just consulted the calendar events in a Google account and showed it in a modern and attractive way -something that Kontact should do too, BTW, hehe-.
Thanks for clarifying.

This is interesting! Is there any code committed for this feature somewhere?

I would be interested to get involved with it

There's a quickgit repo
kde-now

https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kde-now.git

g33kyaditya wrote:There's a quickgit repo
kde-now

https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kde-now.git

Nice!

Any idea on how to create some samples emails to check?

I have in my imap's inbox a hotel reservation (from booking com) and a flight reservation (from united airlines) but for some reason these aren't picked up by the daemon's search job :\

In the mean time I guess I'll try to experiment with new types of process plugins that can extract info from plain text. There are already a couple of libraries/algorithms to do so like the following

http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml
http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/sutime.shtml

jsalatas wrote:

g33kyaditya wrote:There's a quickgit repo
kde-now

https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kde-now.git

Nice!

Any idea on how to create some samples emails to check?

I have in my imap's inbox a hotel reservation (from booking com) and a flight reservation (from united airlines) but for some reason these aren't picked up by the daemon's search job :\

A number of things could be going wrong. First up, the remote mailbox if it's gmail will decline login if you haven't enabled "Enable Less Secure Apps" in gmail. Gmail require OAuth 2.0 which isn't yet implemented. Next, while searching for emails, currently we are looking at the emails from the last month (30 days to be precise). If the email is older than that, search will not produce desirable result. This could be changed, but I don't see a use of searching very old emails. Another thing that could have gone wrong could be, that the daemon did fetch the emails, but couldn't parse it. The emails should follow these schemas : https://developers.google.com/schemas/now/cards in order to be parsed and recognized. Though I guess, booking.com would already be following that schema.
As you can see, a number of things could go wrong. In order to create sample emails, you could look at the Google Now schemas link above.

jsalatas wrote:In the mean time I guess I'll try to experiment with new types of process plugins that can extract info from plain text. There are already a couple of libraries/algorithms to do so like the following

http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml
http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/sutime.shtml

Yes. This sounds very good. Thank You. I was myself thinking about adding some sort of NLP since that would make everything better. But haven't had the time or means in like the past month to do it. If you wanna talk more about the project, feel free to email me. (It's the same as in the project's git log)

g33kyaditya wrote:A number of things could be going wrong...... currently we are looking at the emails from the last month (30 days to be precise).

Yeap! That's it! The emails I mentioned are 3 months old. Will change the code to pick these up and retry. Thanks!

g33kyaditya wrote:

jsalatas wrote:In the mean time I guess I'll try to experiment with new types of process plugins that can extract info from plain text. There are already a couple of libraries/algorithms to do so like the following

http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml
http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/sutime.shtml

Yes. This sounds very good. Thank You. I was myself thinking about adding some sort of NLP since that would make everything better. But haven't had the time or means in like the past month to do it. If you wanna talk more about the project, feel free to email me. (It's the same as in the project's git log)

I'll email you after I have done some more research on this. I'm actually considering to first create a general library that can be used also by kontact (eg to create calendar events based on the contents of the email etc).