With the Apple Tablet the iPad arriving it is time to finally learn how to give your web site an icon for Apple touch devices. Have you visited a website on an iPhone or iPod touch and attempted to tap Add to Home Screen only to be disappointed by the results? Years ago the favicon.ico was only found on a few select websites, but today they can be found just about everywhere. The apple-touch-icon rel link attribute has become Favicon 2.0 in today’s web.
This time stay ahead of the curve and learn how to add an icon for your website to an Apple touch device.
By default instead of getting a nice shiny icon, the iPhone will shrink down the homepage of that site and save the capture as the webclip. It is surprisingly simple to create a custom Apple touch icon for your website in two quick steps.
Create the Apple Touch Icon/Webclip
Fire up any image editor available and create an image that is 57×57 pixels large. Save the image in the root folder of your website or wherever it will reside. Do not worry about trying to apply the glossy effect the image. Safari will automatically composite the icon with the standard “glassy” overlay so it looks like a built-in iPhone or iPod application.
I can confirm that both PNG and JPEG image formats will work.
link rel=”apple-touch-icon”
To apply the webclip to the website simply open the document you wish to apply the icon and apply a link tag in the head of the document:
<head>
<title>My Guy Solutions</title>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/image_name.png"/>
</head>
Once complete make sure the modified files are placed on your web server.
Refresh the page on your iPhone and tap on the “+” symbol along the bottom of the screen. Tap on Add to Home Screen and you will see a preview:
Congratulations you now will now give your visitors a clean icon when they bookmark your site to their home screen.
Tags: apple, favicon, icon, iphone, ipod touch, link rel, webclip
Create a Custom Apple iPhone/iPod Icon For Your Web Site…
With the Apple Tablet arriving it is time to finally learn how to give your web site an icon for Apple touch devices. The apple-touch-icon rel link attribute has become Favicon 2.0 in today’s web….
Works like a dream … thanks!