CalDAV and Airline Saga [Franklin Planner Update 4]

After last week I was able to test out the timezone functionality and data parsing for my replacement for the Palm Pilot Franklin Planner software that I had used for years and loved.

I decided, for my internal personal test version of the app, to see if there was a way to input travel info from my booking email into the PlanPrint software. Boy, was that a mistake and a half without the proper infrastructure backing everything.

So first, the things I’ve learned from this part of the project.

First off, something most people don’t consider: not all bus, flight, or travel APIs have the same level of data quality, so make sure you pick an API that fits your preferred transit companies and airlines.

To be honest, there is no real “free” option for personal use that has webhooks, so I might not add this feature to the public version of the app. But if readers think that would be worth having as a paid feature, I might consider it, though ideally I don’t want this to be a subscription tool, rather a perpetual licence where you pay once and just have that version of the software.

In the end I decided not to include this feature in my “Dogfooding” version of the software until I found a fix for this.

One service that looked really worth trying was AeroDataBox and their API, which gives you 600 free credits per month. I’ll try it out, but sadly I don’t think it would fit for the public release unless I found a way to allow people to add their own API keys.

Some readers might be wondering “Why the hell do you need this feature?” Well, if you must know, it’s mostly a quality of life thing. Rather than having to juggle a bunch of different apps or constantly be panicked and staring at screens, say I’d booked Toronto to Las Vegas [PD653], I’d want something easy to pull from and have sitting in my calendar so I could quickly glance at it and be sure everything’s still on time and running.

Now where does CalDAV come in? Well, that’s the second thing I learned while exploring whether there was an easy method to have my pre-existing email client create the first event. This was not as easy as I hoped.

See, my mail client can talk to CalDAV, and I do mirror CalDAV upstream using PlanPrint to view it [without the ability to edit, preventing dirty sync issues] but figuring out how to actually get data into the app easily has stumped me beyond writing a custom plugin for the mail client.

I know some readers might have ideas, and I’d love to hear some, since after logging that Qantas flight I do not want to have to deal with this headache again.