Lost Remote tip: Custom iPhone icon
Don Day January 17th, 2008
Apple this week released a firmware upgrade for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows uers to set any web page as a “Web Clip” — basically a shortcut icon on the start screen. When users do this, a default thumbnail of your home page will be used as the icon. That’s kinda… lame.
So Apple has made it easy to create a custom icon that will be used. Just fire up Photoshop, start a new document 57 x 57 pixels - and design to your heart’s content. Output the image as a PNG and upload it as “apple-touch-icon.png” in the root folder of your site. The “before” is at right. Keep in mind that the icon will have rounded corners, and the Apple “button” effect overlay.
3 Comments Add your own
1. Kerry | January 17th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Thanks, that’s a great tip!
2. Mike | January 17th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Every station *should* do this, however it just ain’t gonna happen. Look at favicon.ico. Favicon.ico has been around for over a decade now and performs the exact same function for websites in browsers and is implemented the same way. And just like this, it’s free - all you have to do is make a tiny graphic and stick it in your website files. Yet less than half of all stations utilize the branding benefits of a custom favicon.ico file. Lost Remote doesn’t even use it! (Error 404 – File not Found) Station sites get millions of hits every month and stations don’t brand their logos in the visitor’s address bar or bookmarks, so I’d be shocked if more than a handful of tech-savvy stations take advantage of this for a comparatively minuscule number of iPhone users who visit their website.
3. Gorman | January 18th, 2008 at 8:57 am
I don’t know about IB, but I’m fairly certain WorldNow stations didn’t have the capability to do their own favicon.ico. At least that used to be the case.
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