Weather information in Gnome 3.2 and beyond
One of those little cute (but mostly useless) features in Gnome 2 was the weather applet. When Gnome 3 came out, weather reporting was gone. However, it didn’t take long for an extension to be written to give us back this nice little feature. It may even be that this will be officially included in Gnome 3.2.
I was thinking, wouldn’t it be even nicer if, instead of just showing the current weather conditions, Gnome could attach extra information to appointment reminders? For example, let’s say that you have a scheduled (out of office) appointment at 15:00, and that the weather prediction says that it will rain in the afternoon. You could then get a reminder like this
You have a meeting with Mr. Rossi at 15:00 at Bar Such-and-Such. Seeing that it is going to rain, you might want to bring an umbrella.
This got me thinking a bit further. Apart from weather information, there could be other services providing other information that could be (possibly) useful. With a TomTom service and a traffic information service, you might be able to get a message like the following:
You have a flight to catch at 13:30. The journey from here to the airport should normally take 1 hour, but seeing that traffic is really heavy today, you may have to add an hour. To be on the safe side, it is best that you leave in 15 minutes.
I tried to make a simple mockup. I absolutely suck at Inkscape, but I hope you get the idea still. This reminder also gives you the option to act based on the extra information that is provided based on the weather outside.
My question is, would anybody else find this a useful feature? Would it be worth collection weather information, traffic information and any other type of information that is available and use it to give advice or warnings in evolution reminders?
