Google Maps is a permanent tab in my browser. I use it to check the traffic whenever I am about to head out during rush hour. This means that I am checking traffic during the morning and evenings. For a while now, I've been trying to see if there was some way I could just have it record the traffic, so that I can always glance at a semi-up-to-date picture of the traffic. In addition, I could put together some cool animations. Unfortunately, when I looked into this a year ago, I got nowhere. I was trying to do a screen capture of my browser window, and couldn't find any elegant solutions. Thus, I abandoned this project until I discovered PhantomJS at work. At work, we use it to unit test the front end of our web applications. But, I noticed that it also supports screen captures. Thus, I toiled last weekend to finally put together something that would take periodic snapshots of the traffic in my area and make it readily available:
Then, I can go further. This was the traffic for today between 7AM and 8PM:
Pretty happy with the results. I created a wallpaper in Steam's Wallpaper Engine, accessible here.
