iPhone Web Clip Favicon Fun! January 28, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, HowTo, Drupal, Browsers, Trends, Design, Web Sites, interface, Branding, phone, Petentials , trackbackIf you have a web page of any kind - blog, business, social network, whatever - take 3 minutes out of your day and hook this up.
Everyone has a fun little 16×16 favicon to sit in the bookmarks section, links bar, or tabs of their favorite browser (Flock, Songbird and Firefox come to mind). This has been a long-running tradition with webmasters and SEO companies to give you that last bit of branding: the favicon!
Now with mobile devices and desktop apps (rich internet applications, too?) getting into the mix, there is a need for favicons larger than squint. Enter, the apple-touch-icon and associated rel tag, which is even easier to implement than a favicon. No special file formats, no special programs needed. Instead of a screenshot of the web page, you now have a degree of control over a bookmarker’s (webclipper’s? that sounds nice) touchscreen.
All you have to do is name the thing apple-touch-icon.png and throw it in your document root. According to the primary vivid, it should be 57×57px, but that’s actually the rendered size and not likely the size Apple uses internally. If you go to http://apple.com/apple-touch-icon.png, theirs is a nice round 129×129, which is roughly 2 1/4 times larger than 57×57. I figure Apple must know something we don’t, so I’ll play along.
And now, a handy diagram to show you what’s up:
Favicon
16×16Apple Touch Icon
57×57Apple’s Official Icon
129×129
Once you get your image loaded, borrow the boss’ iPhone and add the webclip to your home page. There is also a preview screen that lets you know instantly if your icon is working (not pictured).
The iPhone even added a nice glossy, buttony finish to the experience. Ahhhhhh…! You’ll also notice the edges of your icon may get trimmed (which caused the boss to make a face). This is, as far as I know, normal. If you don’t want the boss to make a face, center the icon and leave some extra space around. Using the Apple example may be a helpful guide.
Last but not least, you may be wondering: “Why do I have to name my icon something so specific, and why do I have to use the document root?” Looks like you don’t. Again our friends at vjarmy.com tell us that there is a rel-tag we can throw in the header if we want to place the icon elsewhere:
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/path/to/my-cool-icon.png" />
If you don’t want to use a .PNG, you have smelly feet, but if you’re OK with being known as the smelly foot man, by all means, don’t use the best web picture format. I also had to dissuade my boss from experimenting with transparency in the .PNG, because I’m quite afraid of the results. Imagine a person with a naked woman on their iPhone desktop; now imagine your company’s logo displayed distastefully close to (or on top of) an unmentionable portion of said woman’s body - with a transparent background! Yikes. I would feel very sorry for Six Apart on that day…
I find the apple-touch-icon tag to be a scoche proprietary for my taste, but so are iTunes tags in podcast RSS feeds, so I guess we must needs put up with a little bullcrap every now and then.
I also heard someone recently complain about sites that have a default iPhone interface, and I mostly agree. They should put the interface on a subdomain so you can get at the regular functionality of the site, but I believe a truly useful service should be user-friendly through multiple interfaces, and traditional web apps are not always suited to touch screens.
If you have any questions (or if I forgot something) buy all means, let me know.
I am also hoping to make a small and fun Drupal module that encourages you to upload a 129×129 image to use as your site’s official webclip instead of a screenshot, so be on the lookout for that. Would you like to see other iPhone-friendly features integrated, like style sheet includes, javascripts, etc? I’d love to know.
Comments»
good little coverage of this. I’ll be making my apple-touch-icon very soon.