MacNN sites, others gain custom iPhone/iPod icons

MacNN and its network sites -- Electronista, iPodNN and Leftlane News -- have gained custom Home icons for the iPhone and the iPod touch. This takes advantage of Apple's WebClip option in the v1.1.3 firmware, which allows users to create Safari bookmarks that launch as if they were native applications. The rules and methods for assigning custom icons is described at Apple's iPhone Dev Center.

The simplest means of doing so is creating an image measuring 57x57 pixels, and uploading it as "apple-touch-icon.png" to the root directory of a web server. There is not even a need to reproduce the reflective overlay found on Apple's own icons, as this is imposed by Safari when the bookmark is created.

Should web developers want to specify a different location or filename for a custom icon, this can be done by inserting the likes of "< link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/customIcon.png"/ >" into the < head > element of a page, where customIcon is replaced by a URL of choice. For the general public, one author has created a custom bookmarklet, which will let people assign a different image to a Home shortcut than the one provided by default, if at all. The easiest means of transferring this to a device is by bookmarking it in the desktop version of Safari and then syncing it through iTunes.

Filed under: iPod, iPhone, developer, Graphics/Web Design
Other story tags: iPod touch, Safari