The iPhone Object

June 26th, 2008

I have an iPhone and love it for so many reasons, the main one being I no longer have to travel with my laptop but keep tabs on the shop with my phone. And if you have one, you know you can add an icon for any website bookmark to your home screen.

Well, the default is to use a screenshot of the website as the icon on the home screen. But I found instructions on making your own custom icon for the iPhone home screen. I found instructions here. Awesome, here it is.

See the logo there? And you don’t have to worry about the rounded corners and shading, the iphone does that automatically. To make an iphone icon for your page, you just have to make a square file, one that is 158 pixels x 158 pixels and save it to your root file as “apple-touch-icon.png”. Heads up that the large file (158 pixels square) had a better resolution than the smaller size listed in the instructions linked to above. It seems it can resize larger files for better resolution so a bit bigger looked better than smaller. And while we’re talking about iPhones, I bought this felt case for the iPhone about a year ago from Working Class Heroes on Etsy and I love it and it’s held up really nicely.

They now have their own independent website and operate under the name “Hard Graft” and can be purchased here. The make them to fit ipods, too. You just push up from the bottom, like a push pop, and up it slides. There it is all snug as a rug in the sleeve.

One last thing, if you want your own little image on the web address bar, it’s called a “favicon” and that is an image sized 16 pixels x 16 pixels–which is so small it’s challenging to make an image work at that size! After you have your image resized, save it in your root file as “favicon.png”. But then you have to go back in and change the file name to “favicon.ico” since most browsers will be looking for this file extension type “.ico” and that’s it. (Detailed instructions found here.)

Entry Filed under: potluck