Add Phone different to your Home Screen!
Thanks to this excellent how-to and a surprisingly little time with Photoshop, we now have our very own custom Home Screen Icon for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. If you’re here with your version 1.1.3 iPhone (or iPod Touch with the $20 upgrade), just click that “plus button” at the bottom and add us to your Home Screen. The iPhone’s bookmark tool is even smart enough to grab the first two words from our title – “iPhone News,” which seems like a pretty good indication of what you’ll find when you tappy tappy that little icon.
The only bummer that I can see is the iPhone is a little overly-aggressive in adding the “glass gradient” curve on the top of the icon, but we dealt with it as best we could.
Be a cool kid and add us to your Home Screen!
January 23rd, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Very nice!
I spent several hours over the weekend making these little beauties for a variety of corp and personal sites, and in my experience I agree with the updated Hicks article (http://playgroundblues.com/posts/2008/jan/15/iphone-bookmark-iconage/) that 60×60@72dpi seems to look the best.
The gloss is a tough nut to crack, as it can look great on solid blacks, but really wash out shadow or dark line detail in more complex images.
However, the apple-touch-icon.png naming convention, IMHO, may limit this becoming a mobile standard the way favicon.ico has. Then again, all the second tier mobile browsing platforms (Nokia, maybe Android one day…) are rocking some Webkit anyway…
January 24th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Via Daring Fireball:
http://allinthehead.com/retro/319/how-to-set-an-apple-touch-icon-for-any-site
January 25th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Hm.. seems like the thing to do next is create a bunch of generic icons and then host them.. then modify the script to let you use any of those generic icons for a given page.
January 25th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
I may switch to that 60×60@72. This is 168×168 with the corners squared off and I let the iPhone do the rest…
January 25th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
It does lend itself to delightful comedy, doesn’t it? Just think what icons Thurrott might use for Roughly Drafted and vice-versa…
The idea of users, rather than site-owners, deciding on the icon used to represent the site is pretty powerful, if topsy-turvy compared to favicons.
(Photoshoping up Septimus round-robin pic to use as PhoneDifferent icon… Remembering I’m stuck on 1.1.1….)
January 25th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Genius! Posting to PD with a new idea soon..