Swimming is a big part of Icelandic culture. So much so that the city of Reykjavik has a website that shows you the current capacity at their swimming pools.

If you inspect the webpage and dig deep enough, you can find the page where the API lives. There is no mention of how official this is, or if it is even open to use, but the JSON can be fetched via a simple GET request.

The JSON is (currently) available here: https://rsconnect.reykjavik.is/gestafjoldi_api/nuna

It is their only pool-related API endpoint and I’ve been told the numbers are not always ‘correct’. It’s the best we have, so take it with a grain of salt.

Others have used this JSON and created an Apple Shortcut to fetch, parse and read out a pool’s attendance. You can read more at Pool People by Samer. There you can get the link to the shortcut. The downside is that your Siri voice will attempt to pronounce the Icelandic names in your language.

As a fun little weekend project, we pieced together a bunch of code from various projects and made an iOS app. Yes, there is a website, there is an API, so why an app? Good question.

We are interested in the places that a general browser is not allowed (yet), like widgets, the car or voice. By creating our own app, we can create a widget that gets displayed on your Home Screen. We can also create a Siri Intent so you can simply ask your HomePod and it will respond or you can use the value of your favorite pool in a larger shortcut workflow. (Sadly CarPlay doesn’t have a good category for non-direction, music or food/charging locations. So nothing there.)

With a few hours of cobbling together some code, we got ourselves a nice little app.

Was it fun? Yup.

Is it useful? For some.

Can we publish it? Not sure.

Technically it uses 3rd party data from the city and there is no mention of a license or even if they will support this in the long run. The display is a Shiny Server, which is usually a front-end to some R dataset. It works, but it certainly doesn’t feel ‘production’. More like a weekend hackathon project that’s online. If it were to disappear, we wouldn’t be surprised.

If anyone is interested in testing it, let us know and we can add you to the TestFlight build.

See Also

Back in 02022, we wrote about the font used in on of the Reykjavik City pools that is probably now 90+ years old: Pool Numbers.