Hollidazed

Apple have now given users the ability to add links to both the iPod Touch and iPhone home page screens for any website. This is a really great feature in the latest software upgrade (even with the additional cost for us iPod Touch owners).

When you bookmark a page in this way the icon used for this home page is simply a thumbnail screenshot of the webpage page unless that website has added a ‘touch icon’ graphic for the site. These work a bit like favicons for apple devices.

The problem is that so far not many sites have these so the icon instead defaults to a screenshot of the webpage instead (ie. not actually that useful when bookmarking multiple sites).

Drew McLellan has written on his blog about an excellent way of hacking around this to add your own icons for any site. This uses a JavaScript bookmarklet that can be added to Safari /synced to your iPod/iPhone. I actually found this a bit fiddley to use but later found a another post that had adapted this script slightly to point to images on their own server.

So finally, I’ve adapted this for myself so I can host my own icons here on Hollidazed, mainly for my own reference but also so I can create icons for my own choice of bookmarks. Hopefully I’ll add a gallery/reference for these in the next few days if anyone else wants to use them.

The Hollidazed Set Touch Icon Bookmarklet.

I had a great break with all my family down in Cornwall last week and just about managed to keep away from the world of web.

I did however make time to read Cameron Moll‘s new Mobile Web Design book. It was a nice short read while on holiday but what it lacked in length it certainly made up for in quality. It’s great to have a book on the Mobile Web that takes a web standards approach and offers some great real world solutions for offering mobile web content.

The day after finishing Mobile Web Design, Apple announced their new range of iPod’s including the new ‘touch’ model – fully equipped with WiFi and Safari. Although the iPhone looks and sounds fantastic (and will hopefully arrive in the UK eventually) I think that it will generally only be taken up by a small group of users in the short term… on the other hand the iPod touch is something that everybody will want and will probably be this years Christmas top seller. Surely this now means that there will be a mass market created of mobile web users equipped with a standards based browser (Safari). This to me is a really exciting development for the web and will open up mobile development. So having been inspired by the book I’m ready to get into it and start looking at the possibilities …back to work then!