Three old Plasma Weather applet TODO items gone for Plasma 5.12

Just when I thought to have missed yet another Plasma feature freeze deadline with the one for Plasma 5.12 LTS and thus a good(?) excuse to re-decrease priority of some planned work on the Plasma Addons Weather applet (from the kdeplasma-addons repo, not to be mixed up with clearmartin’s one from github/store.kde.org) once more and thus delay things even further to a day that may never come, the Plasma team found they need to shift the deadline by some weeks to be after the KDE Frameworks 5.42.0 release.
So excuse gone, no other quickly found… time to do a git pull and open the editor.

It’s almost two years ago that the old Plasma Addons Weather applet got ported to Plasma 5 with an initial release in Plasma 5.6. That activity resulted in some plans for further work, which then though met a sad fate of plans… staying on paper to some degree. Let’s revisit the points of the plan and their state:

• Breeze-style weather state icons: done -> hurra for hard-working Ken
• Overhaul of look: only cosmetic changes applied, bigger redesign never turned into code -> FAIL
• support for more weather data providers: a template for provider plugins has been done and added, but no-one ever contributed a plugin for a new provider -> FAIL so far
• also temperature displayed in compact widget variant, like on panel: got lost in layouting code -> FAIL
• privacy control which weather data providers are queried on finding weather stations: never worked on -> FAIL

Add to that a Plasma 5 Porting TODO item from the code:

• Restore night-style icons for observation weather conditions at night: never worked on -> FAIL

Living in some slightly northern of the northern hemisphere, right now the days are short and the temperature is often around the freezing point. Which makes the weather applet look slightly broken and useless: not showing the temperature directly on the panel for a quick glance to check whether it is slippery outside, but showing the weather observation report with the sun symbol in the icon when it is dark outside… who needs or wants that. Still the applet is working too well for just proposing to wipe it from the repos in favour of one of the alternative ones out there. Of course there is also that tiny bit of pride in the porting work done, which begs for throwing more good time after it… 😉

So motivation collected, some coding time shuffled free: the fight against the new Plasma 5.12 feature freeze deadline was picked up. And to make the already too long story short, I can now happily report that with the help of Kai Uwe and some further random Plasma developers the last three items can now be checked off as Done starting with Plasma 5.12 🙂
(Well, almost, truth is that proper night-style icons are still not available for some stations/providers or delivered data, fixing needs a bigger redesign, which is left for another time)

Selecting which weather service providers to query for a location in the Plasma Weather applet. Spot also the optional temperature shown on both panels next to the weather state icon, as well as proper night-style weather state icon for England’s London during current CET night (sorry for German/English mix in UI, too sleepy for proper setup)

So some 2018 FLOSS contributions of mine done. Now I can slack off the rest of this year! 😛
And watch you doing yours by implementing a plugin for your favorite weather data provider?
Which, BTW, will be also useful to any other Plasma applet which makes use of the Plasma Weather dataengine from the plasma-workspace repo.