Origin Story

Lookup Fatigue

In the summer of 2025, we adopted our first puppy. We named him Huey Louie after the band Huey Lewis and the News. It wasn't for being a super fan of the group, more so that it was a funny name. I found myself having to work from home a lot more often to make sure he didn't completely destroy the house. I had a lot of flexibility to choose when to go to get random chores and tasks done now that I was home all day. Frequent destinations included the grocery market and dog park.

The traffic like, any city, was very unpredictable and I would often get caught up in surprise jams. It was made even worse due to constant construction in preparation for the World Cup. So I started checking the traffic multiple times a day to keep an eye on things. Every few hours I would see how the traffic was. Multiply it by 4 different destinations, I started to feel really tired of typing.

Surely there was a simple widget or something that I could just put on my desktop and show it like so many weather widgets out there. How hard could it be? As a programmer I already knew that there must've been tons of providers of traffic data so there shouldn't be a problem. It would be trivial pull that data down and slap a pretty layer of paint on it and call it a day. Right?

The search

Wrong. As I searched I started to realize that no, this simple widget just DID NOT exist. I dug deeper and literally everything I found was either defunct or didn't actually work the way I wanted. The disappointing results fell into two broad categories:

1: Inadequate

There were a few suggestions like Google maps widgets. Unfortunately they didn't show commute times. It just showed traffic in a little map around your current position

There are also some public transport specific apps, but they were often times just for specific cities but more importantly, didn't really tell you the total length of time of travel to multiple destinations.

I found out that some people were doing something similar in home assistant, a smart home automation platform (which I actually used coincidentally). But I found out that a lot of them were relying on sketchy, unpublished access to platforms like waze and were likely breaking some form of terms. Or they were relying on free google maps api access to do simpler automations. Again, not showing multiple routes that I could read.

2: Commercial offerings

There were a lot of "solutions" that was meant for city traffic management who's price was "call us" AKA not in your budget.

Quick app, in and out

But it didn't make sense. Surely I'm not that weird? I couldn't be the only one who would want something like this. Incredulity changed to excitement however because this was something I knew I could make.

All the app had to do was:

1. Allow me to add common routes that I would take frequently
2. Let me pick between driving and public transport since those are the ones that tend to vary the most
3. Show me in a clear, clean way the time each route was taking, live, in the moment
4. Put something in the menu bar so that I could glance at it easily

But it still was a bit strange to me why this thing didn't exist. Usually easy ideas like this (which some people term low hanging fruit) are all picked clean by throngs of developers who came across the problem earlier. I'm certainly not the fastest nor smartest developer by any means. It wasn't until I dug deep that I unconverted the real reason why it didn't exist. The short version: live traffic is expensive.